The Slower Road Because Of A Hum

Ray takes the old road now. He has since about the middle of June.

The new road is a divided highway and it saves nineteen minutes each way. The old road goes through four towns, has eleven sets of lights, and a school zone that in the afternoon is genuinely something to behold.

He tells people he likes it better. He says there is a bakery. And there is a bakery, and he has been in it twice.

The truth is that the hum starts at about fifty five miles an hour and gets steadily worse from there, and on the old road he never once gets to fifty five.

That is the whole architecture of Ray's summer. He has not fixed a hum. He has built a life in which the hum is impossible.

Now, the arithmetic. Ray drives to work and back five days a week. Thirty eight minutes a day of difference. That is three hours and ten minutes a week. Since the middle of June, that is something in the region of forty two hours.

Forty two hours. More than a full work week, spent driving through school zones, in order to not hear a sound.

And here is the thing that gets me. Ray does not know that number. He has never worked it out, and he would be genuinely startled by it, because a detour never arrives as forty two hours. It arrives as nineteen minutes, which is nothing. Nineteen minutes is a podcast. Nineteen minutes is not worth mentioning to anybody.

That is how a thing like this gets built. Never in a sum. Always in an installment small enough that no reasonable person would object to it.

His wife asked him in August why he never takes the highway any more.

And Ray said, "The old road's nicer."

And she said, "It's twenty minutes."

And Ray said, "It's not twenty minutes."

And then he sat with that for a while, because it is, in fact, nineteen, and he knew it precisely, which is a strange thing to know precisely about a road you take because it is nicer.

Nobody adds it up, because it never arrives as a sum

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

I am not going to guess what that hum is. I have not been in the car and it would help nobody if I tried. And I am not going to tell you the old road is not nicer, because it might be, and there is a bakery.

What I want to do is put the total in front of you, because the total is the thing a detour is specifically designed to keep out of sight.

And there is a moment in Luke where Jesus does exactly this, and it always surprises people.

For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it?Luke 14:28

Now, that is usually preached as a warning. Count the cost before you follow me, know what it will take, do not start what you cannot finish.

But look at the posture in the verse. Sitteth not down first. He is describing a man who stops walking, sits down, and does arithmetic on purpose, and He describes it as the obviously sane thing that any of you would do.

There is no shame anywhere in that picture. It is a builder with a pencil.

You are permitted to sit down and count, and Scripture treats that as the ordinary act of a sensible person rather than as an admission of anything. It is written that a man intending to build sits down first and counts the cost, which is Jesus assuming that arithmetic is what wisdom looks like, and His Spirit is the one who makes that permission real about a summer's worth of minutes.

You have been building something since June without ever seeing the invoice, and the passage puts the counting before the building rather than after it. Luke 14 has the sitting down as the first move and not the last one, and the Holy Spirit is what turns a parable about a tower into a Tuesday with a pen.

The detour is not free, it is just unbilled

Here is what I want to say about the forty two hours, and I want to say it as a pastor and not as an accountant.

That is not wasted time in the moral sense. God was in those hours. Ray listened to things. Ray thought about things. One of those drives, in July, he prayed for his brother the whole way through the second town, and that was not a lesser prayer for being prayed in a school zone.

So I am not here to tell a man he threw away a work week. He did not.

What I am here to say is that he paid for something, and he did not know he was paying, and a person who does not know what they are paying cannot decide whether they want it.

That is the whole cost of an unbilled thing. Not the money. The loss of the choice.

You have a right to know what your own summer has cost, and no part of the written word keeps a person in the dark about their own life. Luke 14 has the builder finding out the number before he commits, and the Spirit of God is what makes that finding out a mercy rather than an audit.

And let me say the hard half plainly, the way I would want somebody to say it to me.

There is a version of this where the hum is a small thing and the forty two hours were a waste. There is another version where the hum is a real thing that got quietly worse all summer while a good man drove around it at forty five miles an hour. I do not know which one it is, and neither does anybody who has not looked, and that is precisely why the not-looking is expensive in a way the minutes are not.

If the car ever does anything under your hands that feels wrong, at any speed, then the arithmetic can wait and it goes to somebody qualified that week.

You were never meant to be the one holding this alone, and Scripture puts wise counsel in the design rather than at the end of it. It is written that in the multitude of counselors there is safety, which makes another person's competence part of the provision, and His Spirit is what makes handing something over feel like sense instead of surrender.