I Nod Along When Cars Come Up

Nainoa has a face he does for this.

It is a good face. He has been refining it since roughly 2009. It is a small tilt of the head, one eyebrow slightly up, a slow nod, and a sound that is not quite a word, and it means yes, of course, obviously, go on.

He uses it at work when the men are talking. He used it three weeks ago at a family thing when his brother in law was explaining what he had done to his truck. He used it in April with a man at a counter who told him something about the car and asked if that was alright, and Nainoa did the face and said yeah, and then paid for it.

He is forty two. He has done that face for something like fifteen years.

And here is what nobody knows, including his wife: it does not feel like lying to him.

It feels like a wall. Behind the wall there is a specific small memory, which is being seventeen in a yard with two older cousins and a car up on ramps, and one of them handing him a thing and saying a word, and Nainoa taking the thing and holding it and not knowing what the word meant or which end went where, and the pause that followed being about a second and a half long, and the laugh being kind, and the whole rest of it being fine.

Fifteen years of a face, built out of a second and a half.

Here is what it has cost, and it is not what people would guess.

It is not that he does not know about cars. Plenty of good people do not know about cars.

It is that the face has to be maintained. Every conversation where cars come up is a small performance, and he does not get to relax in it, and afterward there is a residue that lasts about twenty minutes. And in fifteen years that adds up to a real quantity of a man's peace, spent in ordinary rooms, on nothing.

His son is fourteen and will be learning to drive in two years and has started asking things.

And Nainoa has begun, very recently, to do the face at his own son.

That is the thing that got him. That is why he is reading this.

The face was built to protect a boy

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

I am not going to make a joke here. There is a whole comedy tradition about men who cannot fix things and I want no part of it in this room, because I have watched that joke land on somebody in a way that shut a door for a decade.

And I am not going to guess at anything about anybody's car, because I have not seen it and it would help nobody.

What I want to look at is the second and a half in the yard, and the fifteen years that came out of it.

Because that boy did something sensible. He was seventeen and he was exposed for a moment in front of two men he looked up to, and he built a defense, and the defense worked. It has been working ever since. That is not a character flaw. That is a competent boy solving a problem with the tools a seventeen year old has.

You were a boy solving a boy's problem, and Scripture treats the putting away of what a child built as an ordinary part of becoming a man. 1 Corinthians 13 has Paul speaking as a child and understanding as a child and then putting those things away with no shame attached anywhere to having had them, and the Spirit of God is what makes a defense built at seventeen a thing a man may simply set down.

The trouble is that a defense built at seventeen does not know when the threat has ended.

Now, here is the verse, and I want you to see exactly who it is addressed to.

The meek will he guide in judgment: and the meek will he teach his way.Psalm 25:9

The meek. Not the capable. Not the ones who already have some of it.

And meek there does not mean timid, and it does not mean quiet. In the Hebrew it carries the sense of somebody low, somebody without standing, somebody who has nothing to bring to the table and knows it.

That is the qualification. That is the only qualification named in the verse. And it is not a qualification anybody works up to. It is the position a man is already in the moment he admits he does not know something.

You are exactly the person that promise was written for, and Scripture puts the teaching on the side of the one with nothing to bring rather than the one who has some already. It is written that the meek will He guide in judgment and the meek will He teach His way, which makes the not-knowing the entry rather than the obstacle, and His Spirit is the one who makes that available to a man of forty two in an ordinary week.

You have been qualified for this the entire fifteen years, and the passage never once required a person to have a starting point. Psalm 25 names the low as the ones He teaches, and the Holy Spirit is what turns an ancient promise into a fact about a Tuesday conversation at work.

One true fact, and it is not for the men at work

Here is the practical turn, and it is small on purpose.

The job is not to learn about cars. Fifteen years of a face cannot be undone by a weekend of study, and trying would produce exactly one more thing to perform.

The job is one true fact, learned alone, that is genuinely yours.

Here is a good one, because it is written down, on the car, in plain numbers, and there is nothing to work out.

Inside the driver's door, on the frame, there is a printed sticker. On it are the tire pressures your car is supposed to run at. Numbers, on a label, put there at the factory.

Nobody needs to know anything to read a label.

And once a man has read that label, he has a fact. Not an opinion, not a guess, not a nod. A number about his own car that he could say out loud in a room and be correct.

You have permission to start with something written down, and no verse anywhere requires a man to begin with the hard part. Psalm 25 has the guiding and the teaching happen to somebody being led step by step rather than handed the whole road, and the Spirit of God is what makes one label a real beginning.

And I want to say the thing about your son, because it is why this matters more than a number.

He is fourteen. In two years he will be learning to drive, and he is going to ask you things, and the face is not going to work on him, because a boy can always tell.

But here is what he needs from you, and it is not knowledge. He needs to see a man he respects say I do not know that, let us find out, out loud, without shame, in an ordinary voice.

That sentence, said once by a father, is worth more to a boy than a decade of correct answers.

You were never required to be the one who knows, and the written word puts the teaching in God's hands rather than in a father's. Psalm 25 has God doing the guiding and the teaching, which takes that particular weight off any man's shoulders entirely, and His Spirit is what makes a father free to say four honest words at a kitchen table.