I Plan My Route Around A Squeak

It started in April with a sound on a left turn.

Not a bad sound. A short, high, apologetic sort of noise, once, at the moment the wheel came round. It did not happen on right turns. It did not happen on the highway. It happened when Iosefa turned left, and only then.

Here is what he did about it, and I want you to notice that he never decided anything.

The first week, he simply noticed it. The second week, coming out of the parking lot at work, he found himself going out the far exit, which puts him on a right turn onto the main road instead of a left. He did not think about it. His hands did it.

By June, there was a version of the drive to his sister's that went a mile and a half further and had two left turns instead of five.

By July, he had stopped using the gas station he had used for eleven years, because getting back out of it means a left, and had started using one on the other side of the highway.

And by the end of August, without one single moment of decision anywhere in the whole thing, Iosefa was driving a version of his own island that had been quietly redesigned around a noise.

He does not know how many extra miles. He has never added it up. If you told him he had spent something like nine hours since April driving further than he needed to, he would say that cannot be right, and then he would go quiet and do the arithmetic in his head, and he would find that it is about right.

That is the thing about managing. It never presents a bill. It takes a little, constantly, and it never once sends a statement.

His daughter noticed in September, which is how these things usually come out. She was in the passenger seat and she said, "Why did we come this way?"

And Iosefa said, "It's easier."

And she said, "It's longer."

And he said, "It's easier," again, in a slightly different voice, and she looked at him, and he looked at the road.

Managing has a price and it does not send a bill

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

I am not going to guess what that sound is. I have not been near the car, I do not know the make, and a man at a distance guessing at somebody's left turn is worse than useless. And if that car ever feels wrong under your hands, if the wheel does anything unexpected, then none of this is the subject and it goes to somebody qualified today rather than after the weekend.

What I want to look at is the nine hours.

Because David does something in Psalm 32 that almost nobody in a hymn book does. He writes down what the managing cost him, physically, in his body, before anything got said out loud.

When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long.Psalm 32:3

Sit with the strangeness of that sentence for a second.

He says he kept silence. And then in the same breath he says he was roaring all day long. Both things at once. Nothing was coming out of his mouth, and something in him was going all day at full volume.

That is exactly what a managed thing does. On the outside, nothing. On the inside, a constant low expenditure that nobody can see, including sometimes the person spending it.

And notice what he says it cost. Not his peace. Not his mood. His bones. He puts the price in the most physical place he can reach for.

You are not imagining the tiredness, and Scripture puts the cost of a kept silence in a man's bones rather than in his feelings. It is written that when David kept silence his bones waxed old, which is a report about a body and not a poetic flourish, and His Spirit is the one who makes that an honest description of a summer spent driving further.

You have been paying for this since April in a currency nobody sends a statement in, and the passage names that currency out loud. Psalm 32 puts the roaring and the silence in the same day on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is what turns an ancient man's confession into a mileage count on an island road.

The route is the real subject

Now here is the turn, and I want to be gentle with it because it is the part that stings.

The sound is not the problem I am worried about. I do not know what the sound is and neither does anybody who has not looked. It might be small.

The route is the problem.

Because a route is a life. A route is where you buy your gas and which cousin you drop in on and whether you go past the school. And a route that has been quietly redesigned around a noise is a life that has been quietly redesigned around a noise, and the redesigning went so slowly that nobody in the car ever saw it happen.

That is the thing avoidance is actually good at. It never asks for a large concession. It asks for one small one, forty times, until a man is going out the far exit at work and cannot say when he started.

You have not been weak, and no part of the written word treats the wearing down of a person as evidence about their character. Psalm 32 has David describing his own silence without one word of self contempt in it, and the Spirit of God is what makes that kind of honesty available to a man without it turning into an accusation.

And there is one more thing in that psalm that people run past.

The verse after it says his moisture was turned into the drought of summer. Then the verse after that says he acknowledged his sin, and the whole thing lifts.

Now hear me carefully, because I am not going to let this be misread. A noise on a left turn is not a sin, and nothing about that car is a moral matter. I am not putting a repair in that category and neither is God. What I am taking from the psalm is the mechanism only: a thing that stayed unsaid cost a man in his body, and the moment it came out into the open the cost stopped.

You were never intended to carry a thing in silence, and Scripture puts the relief on the far side of the saying rather than on the far side of the solving. Psalm 32 lifts at the point of the acknowledging and not at the point of the fixing, and His Spirit is what makes that order true of ordinary troubles too.