I Cried In Front Of The Tow Truck Driver

The car had been going for two hours and it stopped about eleven miles from anywhere and Rami waited fifty minutes.

The driver was a man of about sixty who got out, looked at the car, looked at Rami, and said, "Long day?"

And Rami said, "Yeah."

And then he cried. Standing on the grass. In front of a man he had never met, on a Tuesday, at the side of a road, for about twenty seconds.

That was eight weeks ago and he has thought about it every day since.

Not the car. The car was a problem and it got fixed and the bill was manageable and none of that has cost him a night's sleep.

Twenty seconds of a man in his forties crying in front of a stranger.

That is what he replays. That is what arrives when he is trying to go to sleep. And what he says to himself about it, in the small brutal way a man does, is a single word, and the word is pathetic.

Now, I want to look at what was actually going on that afternoon, because a man does not cry about a car.

His mother had been in a hospital for nine days. His work had told him something on the Friday that he had not told his wife yet. He had slept about four hours a night for a week and a half, and he had been holding all of it, competently, in the way a man holds things when he has decided that holding is his job.

And then a machine failed on a road and a kind stranger said two words to him.

That is not a man breaking down. That is a man carrying an enormous amount and finding, at the end of a very long stretch, that a small unexpected kindness is the thing that gets past a guard which nothing heavy could.

His wife asked that evening how it went.

And Rami said, "Fine. Took a while."

And she said, "You look wrecked."

And he said, "Long day," and that was the second time he had said those words to somebody who was being kind to him.

A man does not cry about a car

Let me put down what I am not doing, so nothing has to brace.

I am not going to tell you the crying was nothing. It cost you eight weeks and it is not nothing.

And I am not going to guess at what went wrong with the car, because that is a matter for somebody qualified and it got sorted anyway.

One plain thing first. Nine days with a mother in a hospital, four hours a night, and something from work that has not been said out loud is a great deal for one man, and it can take a person somewhere much darker than a bad Tuesday. If it has gone there, if there are thoughts in it about not being here, tell somebody today: a wife, a brother, a doctor, or the 988 crisis line for anyone in the United States. That is not a detour from this message. It is the most important line in it.

You have been carrying a great deal quietly, and Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart. Psalm 34 puts Him near rather than offering to come, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that nearness a fact about a man standing on grass eleven miles from anywhere.

What I want to do is put one verse in front of you, and it is one everybody knows and almost nobody has thought about in this connection.

Jesus wept.John 11:35

Two words. The shortest verse in the Bible, which is a piece of trivia that has almost buried what it actually reports.

Look at the setting. He is outside a village. There is a crowd. Mary is there, and Martha, and mourners, and people who had come from Jerusalem, and it is a public place on a public day.

And He weeps. In front of all of them.

And then, four verses later, some of the crowd say, behold how he loved him, and others say something less kind, and the text records both without editorializing, and the weeping stands in the record either way.

Now notice what is not in that passage.

There is no explanation. He does not say why. Nobody in the account apologizes for Him, and He does not apologize for Himself, and the narrator offers no defense.

Two words, in public, and the account moves on.

You are not pathetic, and Scripture puts the Son of God weeping in front of a crowd into the record with no apology attached to it anywhere. It is written that Jesus wept, which is reported in a public place before a crowd of mourners and left entirely undefended, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a fact about a man on grass at the side of a road.

You have been holding a rule that the passage does not contain. John 11 records the tears and moves on, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that absence of comment louder than eight weeks of a single word.

The tears were not about the car and they were not a failure

Here is the thing I most want to hand you, and it is about what actually happened in those twenty seconds.

A man carrying nine days of a hospital and a week and a half of four hour nights and an unsaid thing from work is a man under load.

And a load like that does not come out under pressure. It comes out under kindness. That is the mechanism and it catches almost everybody at some point.

Pressure makes a man brace. Kindness makes him unbrace, and everything he was holding while braced arrives at once.

So long day? from a stranger at the roadside was not the thing that broke him. It was the first safe thing that had happened in eleven days, and his body took it.

That is not a failure of a man. That is a man's own system doing something sensible with the first opening it had been given.

You were not undone by a breakdown, and no verse anywhere treats tears as evidence about a person's strength. John 11 has the same man who is about to raise the dead weeping first and without embarrassment, and the Spirit of God is what makes those two facts sit together without contradiction.

And I want to say the thing about the driver, because it matters and it is easy to miss.

He said long day? And when Rami cried, that man did not flinch and did not make a joke and did not look away. He waited. And then he hooked the car up and asked where it was going.

He was a man of about sixty who has been doing that job for a long time, and there is a fairly good chance he has seen somebody cry on the grass more than once, and he handled it the way somebody handles an ordinary thing.

The only person on that roadside who thought it was extraordinary was Rami.

You were seen by somebody who thought nothing of it, and Scripture puts the record of the tears in and leaves the shame out. It is written simply that Jesus wept, with no adjective and no defense, and His Spirit is what makes an unadorned record more useful than eight weeks of an argument.