Everyone on Site Is Talking About Saturday

Half past twelve, and the break trailer smells of microwave soup and wet coats.

Six of them in there. Two on upturned buckets, three along the bench, one leaning in the doorway with a foot up on the step because the bench kills his back. The kettle is going, and that kettle takes eleven minutes, and there is an ongoing argument about the kettle that has been running for two years and will outlive all of them.

Today the argument is about Saturday.

Somebody's brother has a van and will not lend it out. Somebody else says the game is at three, and two of them say it is at five, and one of them has looked it up and is being unbearable about it. There is a barbecue involved. There is a serious and detailed discussion about whether Dave is bringing that gazebo again, given what happened last time with the gazebo, and one of them is laughing so hard he has to put his sandwich down on his knee and wipe his eyes with the back of his wrist.

It is a good lunch break. It is the sort of lunch break he has enjoyed a thousand times.

And he is sitting at the end of the bench with his lunchbox on his knees, nine days after the Wednesday afternoon, and he can hear every word of it from about a mile away.

Nobody in that trailer knows. He has not told them. He is not going to tell them, because he has run the sentence in his head about forty times and there is no version of it that does not stop the room dead, and then somebody would have to say something, and then it would be his fault that lunch was ruined.

Someone asks him if he is coming Saturday. He says he will see. He says it in a completely normal voice. Everybody carries on.

Here is the thing that is hardest to explain, and it is the thing that makes a man think there is something wrong with him. He is not angry at them. He likes them. He would give a great deal to be inside that argument about the gazebo. It is not hostility that is between him and that bench, and it is not their fault, and it is not exactly his either. It is glass.

That is you, and it does not have to be a trailer.

Yours might be the group chat still doing its thing on your phone all evening. It might be the school gate. It might be church on Sunday, three rows of people you have known for fifteen years, all of them pleased to see you, none of them able to see anything. It might be your own kitchen, with your own family in it, being fine.

The world went on being the world. Yours stopped on a Wednesday afternoon. And nobody did anything wrong.

Before anything else: nothing about the glass is your doing. You did not build it by being reserved, or by not sharing enough, or by being the sort of man who keeps things to himself. And I am not going to explain your Wednesday to you, because I do not know why it happened.

The verse never says around

Here is the promise this whole message stands on, and I want you to look at one small word in it that gets read straight past.

When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.Isaiah 43:2

Through. Three times, through. Not around, not instead of, not before it starts.

And notice the other word. When. Not if. The verse grants the water. It grants the river and the fire. It never argues that the man is exaggerating the depth, and it never tells him what the river is for.

So whatever else this promise is, it is not a promise of a dry route. It is a promise about who is in the water.

You are accompanied in this, right now, on that bench with a lunchbox on your knees. Isaiah 43:2 puts the words "I will be with thee" in the middle of the water rather than on the far bank, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a present fact in a break trailer rather than a nice line for a plaque. Nobody had to explain your Wednesday to Him first.

Company is not the same thing as being understood

Here is what I think you actually lost nine days ago, on top of everything else you lost.

You did not lose people. There are six of them in the trailer with you and they would drop everything for you if they knew, and some part of you knows that, and it does not help even slightly.

What you lost is being known without having to explain. That is a different thing, and it is the thing that is missing at half past twelve on a Thursday, and it is why a room full of men you like can be the loneliest place you have ever sat.

You have company that does not require the explanation first, and it is not a lesser kind. What is written has God saying "I will be with thee" without ever asking the man to summarize the situation, and His Spirit is called the Comforter, a word for one who comes alongside rather than one who is briefed. He was in the room on the Wednesday afternoon. He came out to the truck with you afterward.

I am not going to tell you who to call. I do not know your life, and there is a kind of advice that adds a job to a man who cannot lift the ones he already has. If there is somebody, you will know who they are. And if there is genuinely nobody, which is truer for more men than anyone admits, then hear this next part especially.

You were not left on your own in that water, whether or not one person on that bench ever finds out. Scripture has God calling a man by name in the same passage as the rivers, which is language for being known rather than being noticed, and it is the Spirit of God who does the accompanying, which means the company in your life does not depend on the courage you can find at lunchtime.