The Screen Door in October

You were seventeen and it was the second week of October, and the screen door on that house had a spring on it that never got fixed.

You remember the sound better than you remember the argument. You had a duffel bag and forty-one dollars and a ride waiting at the end of the drive with the motor running. Your father was in the front room with the television on and he did not get up. Your mother stood in the kitchen doorway with a dish towel and said drive safe, which was the most she had ever been able to manage, and you have never once held it against her.

And then the door. That spring, that bang, and the dogs going off two properties over.

Nobody said anything behind you.

That was thirty-one years ago. You have run a truck for most of them. You have been to forty-eight states and two of them twice in a week. You married a good woman and buried your father in 2011 and stood at the graveside with your hat in your hands and did not cry, and you could not have told anybody why not.

It is five in the morning at a truck stop outside a town you will not remember by Thursday, and you are sitting in the cab with the engine off and a cup of coffee going cold in the holder, and the thing that has been sitting in the passenger seat since 1995 finally leaned over and said it.

Not one person has ever said one good thing over you on your way out of anywhere.

The last thing He did was lift His hands

Sit still a minute. I am not going to hurry this and I am not going to make you talk about your father.

Let me get one thing out of the way first, and I mean it. Your daddy is not on trial in this cab. Neither is your mother with the dish towel. A man who was never blessed cannot hand out what he was never given, and I would bet the truck that nobody stood over him in 1963 either. That is not an excuse and I am not asking you to call it one. It is just the plain shape of it. The absence is real, and an absence is not a verdict, and I am not fixing to hand you a grudge you did not carry in here.

Now let me show you a leaving that had something said in it.

And he led them out as far as to Bethany, and he lifted up his hands, and blessed them. And it came to pass, while he blessed them, he was parted from them, and carried up into heaven.Luke 24:50-51

Read what He was doing when He went. Not waving. Not giving instructions. Not standing in a front room with the television on. Blessing them. Hands up, words out, and the parting happened while he blessed them, right in the middle of the sentence, so that the last thing those men ever saw of Him was a blessing coming down.

You are standing under lifted hands right now, at five in the morning, in a lot outside a town with no name you can hold. That is not my kindness to a tired driver. That is what is written about how Christ leaves a room, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and sets it down warm in the cab of a truck.

Here is the part nobody explained to you when you were seventeen. When a father blesses a son at a door, he is not making anything up. He is agreeing out loud with what God has already said about that boy. The mouth is a door. God is the one coming through it. And if the power was in the mouth, then a boy whose house had the television on would be unblessed for life, and God has never once written a rule that mean.

The word you did not get at that screen door was never in your father's keeping, so him not saying it never lost it. Scripture says God has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing, done and finished (Ephesians 1:3), and the Spirit is the one who carries a settled thing in heaven down into a man who has driven forty-eight states looking for something he could not name.

Thirty-one years of pulling out of places

Now I want to take something off you, because I think you have been hauling it since about the Fort Smith run and calling it not needing much. What is written will take it off, and the Spirit is the one that lifts.

Somewhere down there you decided the reason nothing was said is that there was nothing to say. That your brother stayed and you left, and the ones who stay get the words. So the silence at that door was not an oversight. The silence was a grade, and you got it, and you have been driving away from it ever since at sixty-two miles an hour.

Son, that is not toughness. That is a man doing his own sentencing with nobody in the room, and Scripture never entered that verdict. The Spirit is here to tear it up.

God has known your name since before that house had a porch on it, and He has never once mistaken you for the boy who left. It is written that He knew you before He formed you (Jeremiah 1:5), and the Spirit who breathed that line is holding it up in front of your windshield this morning, so it lands like testimony and not like a nice thought somebody had about you.

And hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you that October was secretly good for you so you will feel better about the spring on that door. It banged and it was awful and I am not painting it. What I am telling you is that the blessing was never bolted to that doorframe, so when the door shut, nothing of yours was on the other side of it.

The good word you have been driving toward for thirty-one years was already spoken over you before that truck was built. God has blessed us, past tense, in Christ, and His word does not come back to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11). The Spirit is the one doing the carrying, and He does not need you to be at a graveside or in a church to set it down. A truck stop lot will do fine.