I Change Gear Around The Rattle

Yolanda drives a stick, and she is good at it, and she has been good at it since she was seventeen and her uncle taught her in a parking lot on a Sunday.

There is a rattle. It happens somewhere between second and third, at a certain speed, under a certain amount of load. It started in the spring.

And here is what a woman who is good at driving does with a thing like that, without ever sitting down and deciding to.

She shifts a little earlier. She shifts a little later. She has found, over about six weeks, a way through the gears that goes around the place where the rattle lives, the way you learn where the loose board is in a hallway and step over it in the dark without thinking.

It is genuinely skillful. I want to say that plainly, because there is a version of this conversation that treats her like she has been hiding, and she has not been hiding, she has been driving well. Anybody who has driven a stick for twenty five years builds these accommodations. Half the good drivers you know have one.

But listen to what it means.

It means Yolanda now knows more about that rattle than anybody else alive. She knows the speed. She knows the load. She knows precisely which fifteen hundred revolutions it lives inside. She has assembled, over six months, an extremely detailed body of knowledge about a fault, and she has used every bit of it to never hear it.

That is the part I want to put my hand on. Not the not-knowing. The knowing, spent entirely on the avoiding.

Her son borrowed the car in August. He is twenty and he drives fine. He brought it back and said, "Ma, there's a noise in that thing."

And Yolanda said, "Mm."

And he said, "You don't hear it?"

And she said, "I hear it."

And he waited. And she said, "I hear it," again, and started putting away the groceries.

Being good at it is what kept it hidden

Let me set down what I am not doing first, so nothing in you braces.

I am not going to guess what that rattle is. I have not been in the car, I do not know the make, and a woman writing at a distance guessing at somebody's gearbox is no help to a living soul. And if that car ever does anything that feels wrong under your hands, this whole message steps aside and it goes to somebody qualified this week.

What I want to talk about is the skill, because the skill is the surprising part.

Most people think avoidance is a failure of attention. It is almost always the opposite. Avoidance at this level takes real attention. It takes noticing, and learning, and adjusting, and remembering. It is competence, aimed backward.

Now, let me put a verse down, and I need you to hear how I am using it before I say it, because it can be used badly and I am not going to do that.

He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy.Proverbs 28:13

Understand me. A rattle in a car is not a sin. Nothing about that vehicle is a moral matter and I will not let anybody put it in that drawer, including you at eleven at night. God is not looking at your gearbox and thinking about your character.

What I am taking from that proverb is the machinery of it, and the machinery is this: a covered thing does not prosper, and an uncovered thing meets mercy. Not judgment. Mercy. That is the promise on the far side of bringing a thing into the open, and it is the exact opposite of what everybody expects to find there.

You are not a woman who has been hiding, and Scripture puts mercy rather than a reckoning on the far side of a thing brought into the light. It is written that whoever confesses and forsakes shall have mercy, which names what is waiting there rather than what will be demanded, and His Spirit is the one who makes that promise real about ordinary troubles and not only about large ones.

You have been spending real skill on not hearing, and the written word never calls that stupidity even once. Proverbs deals with the covering rather than with the coverer, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an old line about concealment land as an invitation rather than as a charge.

What you already know is worth more than you think

Here is the thing I most want to hand you tonight.

There is information in you. Real, specific, hard won information, and it has been treated as the private machinery of one woman coping instead of as something with value.

Nobody who could actually help you has ever been told: it lives between second and third, at about this speed, when the car is loaded, and it does not do it going downhill.

That is not a complaint. That is a description most people could not produce for any money at all. Anybody who works on cars for a living would rather have four sentences like that than an hour with the car on a good day, because faults hide from strangers and show themselves to the person who drives it every morning.

So the knowledge is not the problem. The direction of it is.

You have been the best witness this car has, and Scripture treats a truthful account as a thing that delivers rather than a thing that accuses. Proverbs says a true witness delivereth souls, which puts real weight on the accuracy of what somebody says they saw, and the Spirit of God is what turns six months of noticing into four useful sentences.

And I want to say the tender part, because it is the reason any of this has been hard.

The reason a woman gets good at not hearing a thing is almost never the thing. It is what she is afraid the thing leads to. A shop. A number. A month where the money does not work. And so the shifting-early becomes a way of holding off a conversation about money that has not been scheduled and may never need to happen.

You were never asked to hold a household together by hearing less, and no part of the written word puts that job on anybody. It is written that He shall supply all your need according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus, which is Philippians describing a supply that does not depend on a woman's endurance, and His Spirit is what makes that a thing to lean on instead of a thing to hope for.