I Started Turning The Radio On

There is a stretch of road between the second gate and the turn at the bridge that takes about seven minutes.

You used to pray on it. Every working morning for years. It was not a plan and nobody taught you to do it, it just happened one autumn and then it was what that stretch of road was for, and after a while your mouth would start without being asked, somewhere around the second gate.

One request, mostly. The same one. You would say it plainly, the way a man says a thing to another man he has known a long time, and then you would come round the bend at the bridge and be done.

And then one week in March you reached over and turned the radio on.

Not because of anything. There was no morning where you decided. You just turned it on, and the seven minutes filled up with somebody talking about the weather, and the next day you turned it on again, and it has been on every morning since.

That was four years ago in March.

You still drive that road. You still see the second gate. Something in you still recognizes it, which is why you noticed last Tuesday, with the radio going, that you had not said the thing out loud in four years.

Let me say this before anything else.

I am not telling you off.

Nothing here is a failure and I have not caught you at anything. Turning a radio on is not apostasy, and I am not going to suggest to you that the request has gone nowhere because a man stopped speaking it into an empty cab.

I am saying I know which stretch of road it was. That is all.

What was happening while the radio was on

Here is a verse God gave to people who had concluded, with what they thought was good evidence, that they had slipped off the list.

Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee. Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me.Isaiah 49:15-16

Look at what He chooses to compare Himself to, and then look at how He goes past it.

He picks the strongest bond a person can name, and then He concedes the point. Yea, they may forget. He does not pretend human faithfulness holds. And then He puts Himself in a different category entirely, and the reason He gives is not an emotion. It is an engraving.

Graven. Cut in. The kind of mark that stays when the mood changes and stays when the day is bad and stays when nobody is saying anything on a seven minute road.

So I want to turn now and speak this over you, hands on the wheel.

You are cut into His hands. Not one day, not once you get the habit back, not when your mouth starts working on that road again. Right now, coming past the second gate with the radio going, you are what is graven there, and the graving happened long before that March. That is not my encouragement. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who sets a written line down in a real man in a real cab at half six in the morning.

Now, why did the radio go on?

I have thought about this and I do not think it was boredom, and I am certain it was not unbelief.

Seven minutes is a long time alone with a request that has not moved. Long enough to hear yourself say it. Long enough to notice, again, that nothing has changed since the last time you said it. And a man who drives that road every morning is going to reach a point where seven minutes of that costs more than he has to spend before a day's work.

That is not backsliding. That is a tired man managing what he can carry, and there is no verse anywhere that condemns him for it.

But look at the last line of that passage, because it is the one nobody quotes. Thy walls are continually before me. Continually. While the radio was on. While the seven minutes were about the weather. God was looking at your walls the whole four years, and He was not waiting for you to say something before He started.

And this next part is settled rather than pending, so hear it. You have not been taken off the engraving, and nothing about four years of silence sanded it down. The word says I will not forget thee, and it is His Spirit who carries a written promise into a real truck on a real morning in a real March.

The road did not go neutral. There is no neutral ground anywhere on it.