Since The Tent Meeting In 1974

The gravel lot outside Coley Brothers Feed and Seed holds about nine trucks and there are four in it, first week of March, ten after eight in the morning. Ray Whitlock is in the third one from the door with the engine off, fifty pounds of hog feed already in the bed, and no reason left to be sitting there.

He is sixty one. He got the feed. He paid. He said good morning to Denise at the register the way he has said good morning to Denise at that register since her mother ran it. He carried the sack out himself because he still can. Then he got in the truck and did not start it.

Across the road the field is that flat brown it goes in March, before anything, and the wind is coming over it hard enough to rock the truck a little on its springs. Ray is looking at the field and thinking about a tent.

The tent was in 1974, on the Hensley place, three fields over from where he is parked. Sawdust down over the grass, folding chairs, a string of bulbs on a wire, and a preacher from out of state whose name Ray never did catch. Ray was ten years old. What he remembers is the heat under the canvas, his mother's hand on the back of his neck, and one sentence, said with a finger out over the chairs. You are the light of the world. And then the part he has carried for fifty one years, which came right after it. So go on and be one.

He has been trying to be one since he was ten.

He has not, in his own accounting, managed it once. He can list the men he never spoke to. He can list the years better than the men, actually. There was the whole run in his thirties when he was too tired. There was the stretch after his brother died when he was too angry to be much use to anybody. There is now, which he does not have a word for. Sunday morning he is in the fourth pew from the back and he has been in the fourth pew from the back long enough that people would notice if he moved. He sets up the chairs. He pulls the church mower apart in April and puts it back together without being asked. And every time somebody up front says that sentence, Ray feels exactly what he felt at ten years old in the sawdust, which is the small cold drop of a bill arriving in the mail.

Fifty one years is a long time to carry a sentence you believe you are behind on.

The wind comes across the brown field again and the truck rocks on its springs. Ray puts his hand on the key and does not turn it. Out loud, to nobody, in the cab, he says the thing he has never said in the fourth pew from the back.

"I do not think I ever was one."

Then he starts the truck, because the hogs do not care what he thinks, and he pulls out onto Route 9.

Nobody ever gave you that job

Three words got added in that tent, and I do not believe for a second the man who added them meant any harm by it. He was full of it, he was moving, he had a field of people in folding chairs and a string of bulbs over their heads, and when a man is that alive he reaches for the next thing to say. What he reached for was so go on and be one.

Read the sentence he had just finished saying, though, and look at what is actually in it. There is no verb in it for Ray. There is nothing there to start. It is a flat statement about what a person already is, in the same grammar you would use to say the truck is blue.

You are the light of the world, and you were that at ten years old in the sawdust, before one word of any job was handed to you. I am not saying that to lift your spirits. It is written in Matthew 5:14, and it was said over fishermen and farm hands who had not done a thing yet and would not do much for a while, and what is written stays written whether or not a man feels it in a truck cab in March. The Holy Spirit does not argue a line like that into a person. He seats it, quietly, in a gravel lot at ten after eight in the morning.

The reason it can stand as a flat statement instead of an order is that the light in it was never yours to make.

Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.John 8:12

He says it about Himself first. I am the light of the world. Then He turns and says the same sentence over a crowd of nobodies, and the sentence holds, because what is in them is Him.

You have the light of life, present tense, in your possession, on a plain Tuesday when you did nothing special at all. John 8:12 does not say he shall earn the light of life, or work up to the light of life, or have it once the record improves. It says he shall have it. The Spirit is not waiting on you to feel that before it counts as true. He is agreeing, this minute, with what the written word already put down.

A lamp is not working at being a lamp

My grandfather kept a lantern hung on a nail inside the milk house door, and it burned kerosene he bought in town in a red can. That lantern never once made kerosene. It could not have. Everything it did all winter, every early morning it hung there throwing yellow up the whitewashed boards while the cans got filled, it did on somebody else's supply.

Now picture what it would look like for that lantern to try. To strain at it. To lie awake worrying that it was not producing. You would feel sorry for the thing, and then you would tell it the truth, which is that it was never the source and nobody ever needed it to be.

You were lit by Christ, and a thing that is lit does not have to work at being lit. Scripture put that beyond argument in John 8:12, where the light of life is described as something a person has rather than something a person generates. What the Spirit adds is that it is about you. Not the people in the pews on either side of you, not the ones who look to you like they are doing it right. You.

That is the whole difference between the sentence as a fact and the sentence as a bill. As a bill it needs a payment history, and yours looks thin to you, so you sit in the lot with the engine off and the sack already loaded. As a fact it needs nothing from you at all, and that is not because somebody let you off. It is because it was never addressed to your effort in the first place.

This is yours, and it was yours in 1974 while you were busy being ten and sweating under a canvas roof. The word said it first, in John 8:12 and again in Matthew 5:14. The Spirit says it again today, in the cab you are sitting in, at whatever the clock says where you are.

Fifty one years of trying to become something you already were is not a wasted life. It is a good man carrying a sack that was never his to lift, up and down a road, faithfully, in the dark.