Shouting in the Car With the Radio Up

He gets on the ring road at ten to seven because that is when the traffic is thin, and he turns the radio up before he is out of second gear.

Not for the music. He could not tell you what is playing. The radio is there so that the man in the next lane at the lights cannot hear what is going on in this car.

Because what is going on in this car is a grown man shouting.

Not crying. Shouting. Both hands on the wheel, arms locked, at the windshield, at the overpass coming up, at the sky over the shopping plaza. Sentences that start with why and do not finish. One sentence that finishes and that he is going to think about for the rest of the day. His own voice coming back at him off the glass, sounding like somebody he does not know.

Between exit eight and exit nine he says something to God that he has never said to another living soul, and he says it twice, and the second time is louder.

Then the lights at the end of the off ramp go red.

And he stops shouting. Instantly. Straightens his back, puts one hand at the bottom of the wheel, and looks straight ahead like a man on his way to work, because there is a woman in a small blue car beside him with a coffee in a holder and she is not to know. The lights change. She pulls away. He gets back on it before he is back up to speed.

He does this most mornings now. He has never once told anybody. And there is a part of him, most of the day, quietly convinced that whatever that was in the car, it was not prayer, and that the real damage this week is not the thing that happened but what he has now said out loud about God on a ring road.

That is you.

Maybe it is not a car. Maybe it is the shower with the water going. Maybe it is a shed, a stairwell, a walk out past the last streetlight, or a pillow. But somewhere in the last few weeks a sentence came out of you that you would not want repeated, and you have been carrying it since, and the carrying is worse than the saying was.

Two things before we go one step further.

I am not going to correct you. Not one word of it. I have no intention of defending God against you either, and if He needs a man like me to run interference for Him with a man like you then we are both in more trouble than we thought.

And I am not going to explain why this happened. I do not know. That is the actual answer, and anybody who has given you a different one this month was making it up in a confident voice.

There is a man in the Bible who said worse

Turn the radio down for a minute, because there is a verse here that almost nobody ever reads out loud.

Therefore I will not refrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.Job 7:11

That is not a bad man. That is not a backslider. That is the man God Himself points at twice as the most upright man on the earth, and what he is saying is: I am not going to hold this in, and I am going to say it in the state it is actually in.

Read on through that chapter if you want the full weight of it. He accuses God of watching him too closely. He asks to be left alone. He says he would rather be strangled. There is nothing careful in it anywhere.

You have not said anything in that car that has not already been said in Scripture, out loud, by a man God was proud of. Job 7:11 is in the book on purpose and not as a warning, and it is the Holy Spirit who carried that chapter down to us, which means the loud version of a man's grief got preserved deliberately by God for people exactly like you.

Now hold on to something, because here is where it turns.

At the end of the book God speaks, and He is angry. But He is not angry at Job. He is angry at the three friends, the ones who spoke about God correctly and carefully the whole way through, and what He says to them is that they have not spoken of Him the thing that is right, as His servant Job has.

The careful men got rebuked. The shouting man got called right.

You are not on the wrong side of that verdict, and the state of your voice this month has not moved you an inch out of God's regard. That is what is written in Job 42:7 in plain sight, and it is the Spirit of God who makes it possible for a man to believe that about himself at ten to seven on a ring road rather than just know it as a fact about somebody else.

What He is not doing while you shout

Let me name the fear underneath this, because I think it is the actual load on you.

It is not that the words were rude. It is that some part of you is sure a line has finally been crossed, and that the withdrawal has already quietly happened, and nobody has told you yet.

That is not what is going on.

You are not being tolerated in that car, you are being heard, and there is a difference and it is the whole difference. What is written all through the psalms and all through Job is that God takes the unedited version, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the one who carries a man's groaning when he has run out of anything you could reasonably call words.

And I want to say this in a way you cannot mistake: an angry man is not a faithless man. Your anger is not evidence against you. Nobody up there is disappointed in you at ten to seven, and the sentence you said twice did not make Him take one step back.

You are not disqualified by how you feel about Him today. Job 7 stands in Scripture as the record of a man saying so, and the Spirit of God did not leave the room while it was being said.