They Will Know I Let It Go

Kai has an appointment on Thursday and he has been dreading it since he made it.

Not because of the money, though there will be money. Because of a moment he has already watched about forty times, and it goes like this.

A man opens the hood. He looks for a few seconds. And then something crosses his face, quickly, that he covers immediately, because he is a professional. And in that expression is a whole assessment, and the assessment is not about the car.

Kai knows exactly what he thinks that face will say. It will say: how long has this been like this?

And the honest answer is a while. Not out of carelessness in the ordinary sense. There was a year in there where his mother was ill and he was driving four hundred miles a month and nothing at all got done to anything. Then there was a stretch where money was very tight. Then there was a period where it had been so long that starting felt worse than continuing.

None of that is going to be visible under the hood. What is visible under the hood is the result of it.

And so Kai, who is a decent and hardworking man, is dreading Thursday because a stranger is going to see a summary of his last three years and draw the wrong conclusion from it.

He has been thinking about cleaning it. Not the engine, the inside. Getting the cups out, hoovering, wiping the dash. Making it look like a car belonging to a man who is on top of things.

He knows that is ridiculous. He is probably going to do it anyway.

His nephew said in the summer, "Just take it in, man. They've seen worse."

And Kai said, "Yeah."

And his nephew said, "They've seen so much worse."

And Kai said, "Yeah," again, in the same voice.

The verdict has already been written, and not by him

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

I am not going to guess at what is under that hood, because I have not seen it and it would be no use. And I am not going to tell you the man on Thursday will be kind, because I do not know him. He might be brusque. Some people are.

What I want to look at is the forty rehearsals of a face that has not happened.

Because the verdict Kai is dreading has already been written. It was written by Kai. He composed it, he assigned it to a stranger, and he has been reading it back to himself since he made the appointment.

The mechanic has not been consulted about any of it.

You have been judged in a room that God has never sat in, and Scripture says He looketh on the heart. 1 Samuel 16 has Him correcting a prophet who was reading a man by what could be seen, and the Spirit of God is what makes that correction reach a workshop on a Tuesday morning.

Now, here is the verse, and I want you to sit with what it says God does.

For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.Psalm 103:14

Two verbs, and both of them are about knowing what a person is made of.

He knoweth our frame. Frame there is the make of a thing. The materials. What it can bear and what it cannot.

He remembereth that we are dust. Which is not a put down. Read the whole psalm. It sits in the middle of a passage about mercy and pity, and the point is that God's dealings with people take their construction into account.

Nobody has to explain the year with his mother to God. Nobody has to establish that the money was tight, or that four hundred miles a month for a year is a real thing that uses a man up.

That is already in the file. It has always been in the file. It is not an excuse that got accepted. It is a fact about the frame that was known before anything happened.

You are not being assessed by somebody who lacks the context, and Scripture puts God's knowledge of a person's frame ahead of any judgment about their output. It is written that He knoweth our frame and remembereth that we are dust, which puts the construction of a person into the reckoning from the start, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a real fact about three hard years.

You have been known the whole way through, including the year that did not leave room for anything else. Psalm 103 puts the remembering with God rather than requiring a person to submit an account, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that a thing to lean on rather than to hope for.

What the man on Thursday is actually going to do

Here is the practical thing, and it is worth having.

Somebody who works on cars sees engines the way a nurse sees bodies. Constantly. All day. In every condition.

A nurse does not go home and think about a person's body. She thinks about her own week and what she is having for dinner. The body was a Tuesday.

And this is not a claim about that man being nice. It is a claim about volume. Somebody who lifts forty hoods a week is not running a moral inventory on any of them, because there is no capacity for that and no interest in it. There is only: what is here, what does it need, what will it take.

The face Kai has been rehearsing is a face that a person makes at a problem, and Kai has been reading it as a face made at a man.

Those are not the same expression and they never were, and the difference is invisible from where he is standing because he is the only one in the room who knows about the year with his mother.

You were never the subject of that expression, and no part of the written word gives a stranger's face the standing to name a person. Psalm 103 gives the knowing of a frame to God rather than to anybody looking at it from outside, and the Spirit of God is what keeps a Thursday morning from becoming a verdict.

And now the small hard thing, said gently.

Do not clean it.

Not because there is virtue in a dirty car. Because cleaning it is a performance for an audience that is not there, and doing it would confirm to Kai, in his own body, that he was right to be ashamed. It would teach the shame something.

Take it in as it is. Cups and all.

You have permission to be seen as you are, and Scripture never once asks anybody to be presentable before they are handled. It is written that God commendeth His love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us, which is Romans 5 putting the whole transaction before any tidying, and His Spirit is what makes an untidy car on a Thursday a completely safe thing.