Six Years Of Fine

The break room at Trellick Freight has a vending machine that takes a dollar and gives nothing back about one time in nine, and everybody knows which slot it is, and nobody has reported it because then they would take the machine out.

Twenty to seven. Dane Cordova gets his coffee from the pot Ozzie made at half past six, because Ozzie is always in first and always makes it, and the coffee is bad in a way that is now part of the building.

Ozzie says, "How you doing, Dane."

Dane says, "Fine."

He has said fine in that room for six years.

He said it the morning after the night Marisol told him she was done, and he said it the following Monday, and the Monday after that. He said it the whole spring his mother was dying two states away and he was driving out on Fridays and back on Sundays. He said it the week his son Teodoro stopped picking up the phone, and he has gone on saying it for the three years since, every workday, to a man who makes the coffee.

And here is the thing that would surprise anybody who thinks fine is cowardice.

Dane has a reason for every single one of them, and every reason is good.

He is not going to say it in that room because two years ago a shift lead named Barry told the whole break room about his divorce, and Barry was a decent man, and for eleven months afterward people did a voice. Dane watched that happen. He is not going to hand anybody a voice to do.

He is not going to say it to Ozzie because Ozzie has a daughter with something wrong with her spine and drives to a hospital in another county on his days off and never mentions it, and Ozzie is carrying his own weight already, and twenty to seven on a Tuesday is not where you set something down on a man like that.

He is not going to say it because "how you doing" is a greeting. It has the grammar of a question, but it is not one. It is the sound two men make to establish that they are both here and neither is angry. Answering it as though it were a question would be a small act of violence against the room.

So: fine. Six years of it. Every one of them accurate to what the moment was actually asking for.

The thing that gets him, if he lets it get him, is not the lying. He is not lying.

It is standing in a room with eight people in it at twenty to seven, and the machine humming, and the coffee bad, and understanding with complete clarity that not one person in the building has any idea he is in there.

Fine is not a lie

Start with what is actually true, because the usual sermon on this begins by getting it wrong.

Fine is not a lie. Fine is a door, and a door is not a deception. Every house has one, and a man who keeps his closed at work is not a coward and is not a hypocrite, he is a man with a door.

More than that, some doors are closed for load bearing reasons. Barry and the eleven months of the voice is a load bearing reason. Ozzie and the spine and the drive to another county is a load bearing reason. Anybody who tells you to fling the door open in a room where you have watched what happens to open doors is asking you to pay a real price for their idea of authenticity, and they will not be there in month three.

So let me say plainly what this is not going to do. Nobody here is going to ask you to tell Ozzie. Nobody is going to hand you a sentence to try at the coffee pot on Thursday, or suggest that six years of privacy was six years of failing at something.

You are not hiding, and Scripture is not standing over that break room waiting for you to prove otherwise. I am not being generous with you. Matthew 10:26 opens with fear them not, and the uncovering is the second half of the verse and not the first, and the Holy Spirit keeps those two in that order when He brings the line anywhere near a man like you.

Fear them not therefore: for there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known.Matthew 10:26

Look at where Jesus is standing when He says it. He is sending twelve men out and telling them, honestly, what is coming: they will be handed over, spoken against, dragged into rooms. And into that He says fear them not, because nothing covered stays covered.

That sentence has been used as a threat for a very long time. It is not a threat. It is a comfort spoken to people about to be misrepresented. What He is telling them is that the account of them held in a hostile room is not the final account, because there is a knowing that goes all the way down and it belongs to God.

You have a knowing standing over your life that no break room can revise, and it was already in place before you started saying fine. That is the written word's own use of the sentence, in its own context, and it does not have to be argued into shape. What the Spirit does here is refuse to let a promise about God's seeing get repurposed into a demand about your talking.

What is already uncovered

There is a line in Psalm 139 that people quote for comfort and then quietly do not believe.

The psalm says that if a man says surely the darkness shall cover me, even the night shall be light about him, and then it says this: the darkness and the light are both alike to God.

Both alike. Not that He can see in the dark with effort. That the categories do not apply to Him at all. There is no dim side of the building where a man is standing unaccounted for at twenty to seven.

Which means the seeing you have been quietly going without at work is not actually going without. It is only going without from the people. And here is the strange comfort in that: the seeing you have gone without from the people is the kind you were never obligated to go and get.

You are seen right now, in the exact chair you are sitting in, and you were seen through every one of those six years without ever once explaining yourself. Psalm 139:12 puts it in writing, the darkness and the light are both alike to Him, and His Spirit is not shining a lamp on you. He is telling you there was never a dark side of the room to be standing on.

Now, one more thing, because it matters and it is where this could still go wrong.

None of this means the closed door is permanent, and none of it means the door has to stay shut to be holy either. Some men find one person, eventually, in the right room, at the right hour, and it is good. If that comes, it will come like weather and not like a decision you forced.

But it is not the point of this, and it is not being set as a goal for you here.

You were never assigned the job of being visible, and nothing about you is waiting on a conversation you have not had. Matthew 10:26 hands the revealing to God and keeps it there, and the verse never once puts the work on the one being revealed. The Spirit is content to leave it in God's hands, which is where the psalm and the promise both put it.