Nobody Is Checking On You Now

At twenty to seven on a Thursday he walks out to the end of his own drive and stands there in the gravel with his hands in his pockets.

There is a mailbox on a post that has leaned since the frost two winters back, and a stand of poplars at the property line, and the light coming across the top of the hay. Somewhere off toward town a dog is barking at nothing. The road is empty in both directions, which it usually is, and he stands in the place where the gravel meets the blacktop and looks up it the way a man looks up a road.

For fourteen months there was a car on that road at twenty to seven on a Thursday.

It was always the same. She would come up the drive, and they would sit at the kitchen table, and she would ask the same four questions off the same form, and he would answer them, and she would write in the boxes and turn the page around so he could see it, and at seven she would say see you next week and go. Fourteen months of Thursdays. He could tell you the sound the car made on the cattle grid without looking up.

Three weeks ago it ended. Not badly. It ended because it was supposed to end, because the whole point of the thing was that it would stop being needed, and on the last visit she shook his hand at the door and said something kind and meant it, and drove down the drive, and that was that.

He would tell you he is not waiting. He would say he came out for the air, and it is true that the evening is worth coming out for. But he came out at twenty to seven, and he will go back inside at about five past, and he has done this every Thursday for three weeks.

What he cannot say out loud is what the empty road actually feels like. It is not grief. It is not even sadness, exactly. It is the particular flatness of a man who has just worked out that for fourteen months somebody knew how his week went, and now nobody does. The form was a nuisance. The form was also, it turns out, a kind of being held. And when the holding stopped, what came in behind it was not the feeling of a door opening. It was the feeling of being set down and left.

You are the one at the end of the drive. I am not going to guess what your Thursday was and I am not going to ask what was in the boxes on the form, because that is yours and it is not mine. What I have to say is about the hour, and about who is standing in it.

The One who goes ahead does not carry a clipboard

Let me name the weight before I go anywhere near lifting it, because this one gets congratulated instead of understood. Everybody said well done. Nobody asked what Thursday was like now.

It is not that you want to go back. It is that being watched over, even by a woman with a form, told you every week that your life was being kept track of somewhere outside your own head. And when that stopped, a thought moved into the empty hour that a man would be ashamed to say to anybody: that he was only ever as good as the person who was checking on him. That without a Thursday there is no witness to the week, and a week with no witness might not be a week at all.

Hear where the answer comes from, because it is older than any Thursday. Deuteronomy 31 was spoken over a whole people standing at the edge of open country, on the day the man who had led them for forty years told them he was not coming with them. That is the exact shape of your evening, and the Holy Spirit is the one saying it at the end of a gravel drive. You were not set down and left. You were handed forward, and the handing was into the care of Someone who was already up ahead of you on the road.

It is the LORD who goes before you. He will be with you; he will not leave you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed.Deuteronomy 31:8

Look at where that sentence is standing. It is not spoken into a settled life. It is spoken at the exact moment the supervision ends, to people whose whole known world had been a man on a mountain telling them where to camp, and who were now going to walk into a country nobody had mapped for them. God does not tell them the arrangement will continue. He tells them who goes in front.

That is not comfort I made up to fill your gap. It is written in Deuteronomy 31, and the Spirit who put it there is the one holding the ground under your boots at the end of the drive. You have Someone ahead of you on that road, and the arrangement that ended was never the thing keeping you.

Held is not the same as watched

Now, gently, because I am not going to make a fool of you for missing it: wanting the Thursday back is not a betrayal of anything. A man is allowed to miss the shape of a thing that helped him. Predictability is a real comfort and the loss of it is a real loss, and God is not standing in your driveway rolling His eyes at a grown man who liked knowing what six forty was for.

But look at the two different things you have been holding in one hand. Being watched is somebody outside you keeping an account of your week. Being held is Someone keeping you. They feel alike from the inside when you have only ever had the first one, and they are not alike at all, and only one of them ever stops. Ask the Holy Spirit which one you have actually been living under; He has been the second one the whole time.

He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber. Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.Psalm 121:3-4

Because Psalm 121 says the One who keeps you does not so much as doze, and because the same Spirit who wrote it is awake at seven o'clock on a Thursday in August, hear this: it is already settled, and the keeping of you did not have office hours and did not close when her car went down the drive.

And here is the turn that took me a while to see. That file closed because you crossed. It closed the way a bandage comes off, because the arm holds. Nobody dropped you; you were discharged, and being discharged is what the whole fourteen months was for. The end of the checking was not the withdrawal of the care. It was the care arriving where it was going.

One plain thing before we go on, and I would rather say it and not be needed. If the empty hour has gone somewhere dark, if the Thursdays are long and there is something on you that will not put down, tell one human being today, and if there is any danger at all reach the crisis line where you live and stay on it until a real voice is with you. Reaching for a person is not going back. It is one of the ordinary things a free man does in open country.