It Started After I Lent It Out

Wendell lent the truck to his sister's boy for eleven days in July, and he was glad to do it, and he would do it again tomorrow.

The boy was moving a household. He is twenty four and he has a good heart and he is not careless, and he brought the truck back with a full tank and a jar of his mother's preserves on the passenger seat.

The noise started somewhere in that eleven days.

Now, Wendell does not know that it started in that eleven days. That is the first honest thing to say. He did not drive the truck for eleven days, and when he got back in it there was a noise, and those are the only two facts he has.

But a mind does what a mind does, and by the second week of August there was a small sentence living in the back of his head that he had never once said out loud, and it went: it wasn't doing that before.

Here is what that sentence has cost, and it is a great deal more than it looks.

He has not taken the truck in. Not because of money, which is manageable, and not because of time, which he has. He has not taken it in because somewhere in him he believes that finding out what it is might turn into finding out what happened, and finding out what happened might turn into a fact about a boy he loves.

So the noise stays uninvestigated, and the boy stays innocent, and Wendell has quietly decided that this is what loyalty costs.

His wife asked him in August, in the plain way she has, "You getting that looked at?"

And he said, "It's on the list."

And she looked at him for a second longer than the answer needed, because she has been married to him for thirty one years and she can hear a load bearing sentence when one goes past.

Two things that got tied together

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

I am not going to guess what that noise is. I have not been near the truck, I am not qualified, and a man at a distance guessing at somebody's engine is worth nothing to anybody. And if that truck ever does anything under your hands that feels wrong, this whole message stands aside and it goes to somebody qualified this week.

What I want to do is untie a knot, because two entirely separate things got knotted in the second week of August and neither of them can move while they are tied.

The first thing is: there is a noise in a truck.

The second thing is: a boy borrowed it.

And I want to say something that is going to sound too simple, and which is nevertheless true. A shop can only ever answer the first one. Nobody who puts that truck on a lift is going to hand a man a piece of paper about his nephew. They will tell him what is worn or loose or done, and that is the whole of what they can say, and it will not have a name on it.

You are not waiting on a verdict about anybody, and Scripture puts a man's heart at rest before the news arrives rather than after it. It is written in Psalm 112 that he shall not be afraid of evil tidings, for his heart is fixed, trusting in the LORD, which settles a man ahead of the report instead of leaving him to be settled by it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that true of a truck on a lift and a page with no name on it.

So the fear is not of information. The fear is of a story that a man is going to build on top of the information, in his own head, on the drive home.

Now let me put down the passage, because Paul says something about love here that gets quoted at weddings and almost never used where it actually bites.

Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.1 Corinthians 13:7

Believeth all things. People treat that as gullibility, and it is not. It is a settled posture toward a person. It is a decision, made in advance, about how their actions will be read when the reading is ambiguous.

And notice what it is not. It is not a rule about avoiding information. Love does not require a man to leave a thing unexamined. It requires him to have already decided, before he examines anything, what he thinks of the person.

That is the whole difference, and it changes everything.

You are not protecting that boy by leaving a truck unlooked at, and Scripture puts love's believing in the reading of a person rather than in the avoiding of a fact. It is written that love believeth all things, which is a posture held toward somebody and not a refusal to know things, and His Spirit is the one who makes that distinction hold at the counter of a shop.

You have already decided about your nephew, and the deciding happened years before July. 1 Corinthians 13 puts the believing and the enduring together as a way a man is toward another man, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that decision stronger than whatever a mechanic says about a bearing.

What loyalty actually costs

Here is what I most want to hand you, from one man who has been on the road a long time to another.

Loyalty here has been getting paid in the wrong currency.

Loyalty is not paid in unexamined trucks. It is paid in what a man decides about a boy on the drive home, whatever he has just been told.

And a man who has already made that decision can walk into any shop in the county and hear anything at all and walk back out with his nephew exactly where he was, because the deciding was done in advance and the information has no power to move it.

That is what believeth all things actually buys. Not ignorance. Freedom to look.

You were never asked to stay uninformed in order to stay loyal, and no part of the written word puts those two on the same side. 1 Corinthians 13 sets love's believing beside its enduring rather than beside a closed door, and the Spirit of God is what makes that a workable thing on a Tuesday.

And I will say the tender half, because it is what is actually going on.

That boy came back with a full tank and a jar of preserves. A young man who does that is not a young man who broke something and said nothing. Everything you actually know about him points one direction, and the sentence in the back of your head points the other, and the sentence has been winning since August because it is the only one that has never been said out loud.

You have thirty one years of knowing that boy and eleven days of not driving your own truck, and the passage gives the weight to the first one. It is written that charity thinketh no evil, which is 1 Corinthians 13 in the same paragraph putting the burden on the loving rather than on the loved, and His Spirit is what makes an old wedding reading useful in a hayfield.