It Goes Off Again, So It Cannot Be Real

Here is the log Keoni does not know he has been keeping.

Second week of May, on the way back from his brother's, the light came on. It stayed on for four days. On the fifth morning it was gone.

Middle of June, coming down the hill in the rain, on again. Nine days that time. Then off.

Late July, one afternoon only, and by evening off again.

August, twice. The first time for a day and a half. The second time for the whole of the last week of the month.

Right now, as of this morning, it is off.

And every single time it has gone off, the same thing has happened in Keoni's chest. A kind of settling. A small unmistakable feeling of there, see. And a sentence, never spoken out loud but absolutely believed, that goes something like: if it was serious it would stay on.

Now, I want to be very careful here, because there is a way of writing this paragraph that makes a good man look like a fool, and I am not going to write it that way.

Keoni is not being stupid. He is doing something extremely human and, in almost every other area of life, extremely sensible. He is weighing evidence. A thing that comes and goes looks less alarming than a thing that stays, and he has four months of the car driving perfectly well to set against it, and he has never once had any trouble on the road.

He is running a test. The trouble is that he is running it on the wrong subject. He thinks he is testing the car. What he is actually testing is his own ability to interpret a signal he was never taught to read, and he has appointed himself the judge, the expert witness and the jury in a matter where he holds no qualification at all. That is not arrogance. That is what a person does when nobody has offered them a better arrangement.

His nephew rode with him in August, saw it, and said, "How long's that been doing that?"

And Keoni said, "It comes and goes."

And the boy said, "Yeah, but how long?"

And Keoni realized, sitting at the lights, that he did not actually know. He knew a feeling. He did not know a number.

The evidence and the judge are the same person

Let me put down what I am not doing here, so nobody braces.

I am not going to guess what that light means. I have not seen the car, I do not know the engine, and a voice at a distance guessing at a dashboard is worth less than nothing. I am not going to tell you that a light which comes and goes is serious, and I am absolutely not going to tell you it is nothing, because both of those would be a stranger pretending to knowledge he does not have.

What I want to talk about is the courtroom.

Because for four months there has been a small trial running, with one man in every seat. He gathers the evidence. He decides what the evidence means. He delivers a verdict. And then, being a fair man, he acts on his own verdict in good conscience.

And every acquittal has been handed down on the same ground: it stopped, therefore it was not real.

You are not a careless man, and four months of weighing has been the work of somebody trying to be responsible rather than somebody trying to get out of something. It is written that Jesus asked a crowd why even of themselves they did not judge what was right, which is Luke 12 assuming ordinary people are capable of judgment rather than telling them to stop, and His Spirit is the one who makes that an invitation instead of a rebuke.

Yea, and why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?Luke 12:57

That question has some heat in it, and it is worth feeling the heat.

He has just finished saying that they can read the sky. They see a cloud rising in the west and they say a shower is coming, and it comes. They feel the south wind and they say it is going to be hot, and it is. These are farmers and fishermen and they are very good at this.

And then He asks why, being so able to read what is in front of them, they will not do the same with the thing that actually matters.

He is not asking them to become experts. He is asking them to stop declining to look.

You have the capacity to judge what is right, and Scripture assumes that of you rather than reserving it for somebody with a certificate. Luke 12 puts the question to a crowd of ordinary working people, and the Holy Spirit is what turns a first century question about weather into a question about a dashboard.

Stop grading, start recording

Here is the practical turn, and it is very small.

The problem is not that Keoni reached a wrong verdict. The problem is that he was never in a position to reach any verdict, and neither am I, and neither is anybody who cannot put a reader on the car.

So the job is not to judge better. The job is to stop judging and start recording.

A verdict is a thing a person makes out of a feeling. A record is a thing that exists on paper whether anybody feels anything or not. And a record is exactly what a person who does know how to read these things needs, and cannot get from a shrug.

It comes and goes is not information. On since the second week of May for four days, on again in June for nine, twice in August is information. It costs a pen.

You have been sitting on something valuable without knowing it, and the written word treats an honest account of what happened as worth more than a confident opinion about it. Proverbs says the first to plead his cause seems right until his neighbor comes and searches him, which is a whole doctrine of getting a second look, and the Spirit of God is what makes handing something over feel like wisdom rather than weakness.

I will say the hard part too, plainly, because leaving it out would be the same failure in a nicer coat.

If that car ever does anything on the road that frightens you, if it hesitates, if it pulls, if something feels wrong under your hands, then none of this applies and the record can wait. That goes to somebody qualified right away. A message is not worth a mile that should not have been driven.

You were never asked to carry a judgment you have no training for, and no part of the word puts a burden on a person that God did not hand them. It is written that we are members one of another, which makes another person's competence part of the provision rather than a last resort, and His Spirit is what makes leaning on it ordinary.