He Was Going to Retire in March

The last truck goes out at ten past five and after that the yard gets quiet in a particular way, and he likes that ten minutes and always has. Gravel. The roll-up door coming down somewhere behind him. The light going orange along the top of the fence, the way it does in that stretch of the year.

He is standing by the gate with his thermos in one hand and the lid in the other, not drinking it, just holding both.

There is a strip of tape inside his hard hat with a number written on it in marker. He has been changing that number himself, by hand, for two years. It was in the hundreds for a long time and it is not in the hundreds anymore, and that is the whole problem, because the number does not mean anything now.

March. He was going to be done in March. He had told people. That is the part he keeps circling: he had told people, out loud, at a table, more than once, and now he is going to have to walk it back to every one of them individually.

Two weeks ago there was a conversation in an office with a laminated table in it, and afterward he went and sat in his truck for a while with the engine off and then came back in and finished the day, because that is what you do.

He is not doing arithmetic on the years now. He has tried and it does not come out. It is not March. It is not the year after March. He genuinely does not know what number belongs on that piece of tape and he has not been able to make himself take it out of the hat either.

Somebody yells goodnight from across the yard and he lifts the thermos at them, the same way he has lifted it at them for eleven years, and his face does the whole normal thing.

You know this gate. Maybe yours is not a work yard. Maybe it is a wedding date, or a house you had already picked the paint for, or a country you were going to move to in the spring, or a course you were three semesters into. Maybe it is just a shape of the next five years that you had gotten used to living toward without ever writing it down anywhere. Somewhere in the last few weeks a conversation took it off the calendar, and now the calendar itself feels like a thing that lies.

Hear me first. This is not a failure of faith, and the plan was not a sin. You did not want the wrong thing. Wanting to finish, wanting to rest, wanting a date on a piece of tape inside a hard hat, none of that was greed and none of it was presumption, and I will not stand here and turn your plan into your problem.

And I am not going to explain why the date went. I do not know why the date went. Anybody who has told you this week what it was for was guessing, and guessing about your life in a confident voice.

So. Stand at the gate a minute. I will hold the lid.

This verse is not a rebuke

I want to hand you a line that people have used on you badly, and I want to hand it back to you the right way up.

There are many devices in a man's heart; nevertheless the counsel of the LORD, that shall stand.Proverbs 19:21

Now watch what it does not say. It does not call the devices foolish. It does not call them arrogant, or presumptuous, or unspiritual. In Hebrew that word is just plans. Thoughts a man has and works toward. The proverb makes no comment on the quality of yours, and neither will I.

What it says is that there is a counsel of the LORD, and that counsel stands.

Stand is a standing-up word. It is what a wall does. It is what a man does when everyone else in the room has sat down. It does not mean God's idea eventually wins an argument with yours. It means there is something upright and load bearing in your life that was upright before you ever picked a month, and is upright now with the month gone.

You have something standing in front of you that was never made out of a date, and it is standing at ten past five this evening. That is not my encouragement about your yard: Proverbs 19:21 puts the standing on His counsel and states it as a plain fact rather than a hope, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a fact off a page and sets it upright inside a man holding a thermos at a gate.

And here is the thing I refuse to do with this verse, because it has probably already been done to you in a kind voice.

I am not going to tell you that the plan was taken because God had a better one. That sentence sounds humble and it is actually enormous, and nobody saying it to you has any way of knowing whether it is true. It also quietly makes your loss into a lesson, and your March into a mistake, and you into a man who wanted the wrong thing.

You are not being corrected by what happened to you, and you were not shown up as a fool for planning a life. What is written stops at saying His counsel stands, and it never once turns around and calls the man's plans an offense, and the Spirit of God has never needed to break a man's calendar to get his attention.

What is standing when the calendar is not

Let me say the hard part carefully, because it is the part that keeps you awake.

The date is gone. I am not going to soften that or hand you a smaller word for it. Ten years of walking toward a specific month is not nothing, and the walking was real work, and the loss is a real loss.

But look at what the proverb quietly assumes. It assumes there is a counsel. It assumes there is something ahead of you at all, something with a shape, something that did not evaporate when your drawing of it did.

The road did not disappear because your map did.

You have a future that is being kept by Somebody, and you are not the one who has been carrying it all this time anyway. Scripture makes His counsel the thing that stands and never asks the man to see it in advance, and it is His Spirit who holds the part of a life that a man at a gate has no way of looking at.

And listen, none of this took Him by surprise. That is different from saying He arranged it, and I am not saying He arranged it, because I do not know that and neither does anybody else who has said it to you. What I do know is that nothing about the last two weeks arrived as news to Him.

You were not lost track of somewhere between the office and the truck, and you are not standing in that yard outside of anything. The written word puts the counsel in place before the devices are ever counted, and the same Spirit who was with you in the parking lot with the engine off is in the yard with you now.