A Story That Was True Ten Years Ago

He has told the one about the truck about four hundred times, and last month he heard himself tell it and did not like the sound.

It is a good story. It is his best one and it is completely true and he has never embroidered a word of it, which for a man who tells stories for a living is worth something. February 2016, a diesel pump on a truck he could not afford to fix, a job forty miles away he could not get to without it, and a man from two counties over who turned up at seven in the morning with a part in a paper bag and would not say who told him.

He has told it in barns and in halls and once on the radio. He tells it at a certain speed. He knows where the laugh is and he knows where to slow down.

And in a hall in the spring he got to the part with the paper bag, and he heard his own voice do the thing it always does, and a sentence went through his head sideways while his mouth carried on: you are a guide in a museum.

That is exactly what it felt like. A man in a uniform pointing at a cabinet. Ladies and gentlemen, in this case you will see a diesel pump, donated by an anonymous benefactor in February 2016. Please do not touch the glass.

He finished the story. It landed the way it always lands. Two people came and told him afterwards it was just what they needed, and he believed them, and that made it worse.

Here is what he has been chewing on since. It is not that he has run out of stories, though he has thought about that. It is that he cannot find a newer one. When he goes looking through the last three or four years for something to tell, he comes up with nothing that has that shape, and the conclusion sitting at the end of that thought is one he has not said out loud: that whatever was going on in 2016 was going on then, and something has changed, and the man telling the story is not the man the story happened to.

What Samuel carved into a rock

There is a moment in Samuel that people put on cards without reading what it is doing.

The Philistines had come up, and it had gone badly for them before, and this time it did not go badly. And afterwards Samuel did a thing that looks sentimental and is not.

Then Samuel took a stone, and set it between Mizpeh and Shen, and called the name of it Ebenezer, saying, Hitherto hath the LORD helped us.1 Samuel 7:12

Look at the word he chose. Hitherto. Up to this point. Up to here.

He did not carve on that stone: on this day the Lord helped us. That would be a monument, and a monument is a thing about the past. He carved a word that runs from an event all the way to whatever moment you are standing in when you read it. Hitherto is a word with a live edge on it. It includes today, whenever today is, and it will include today again tomorrow.

So hear this over you in that hall. That story is not in a cabinet. It is a stone with hitherto carved on it, and hitherto reaches to the spring you are standing in. That is not my sentiment; it is what His word did with a rock on a road between two towns, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes a Hebrew adverb and makes a man's chest go quiet with it.

Now let me take the harder thing off you, because the museum was never the real trouble.

The real trouble is the conclusion you have not said out loud. That something has changed. That the man is not the man.

Here is what is actually true, and I want to say it plainly because you are a plain man. Nothing about God's willingness changed between 2016 and now. Not one degree. What changed is that in 2016 you were in a position to notice, because you were desperate and watching, and the past three years have been steadier and busier and you have been looking at the road rather than the ditch.

That is not a decline in you. That is what happens to a man who is carrying a lot of other people. And Scripture never once measures a person's standing by how recently they can date a rescue, and the Holy Spirit does not keep a rolling twelve month record of anybody's evidence.

You are helped right now, in the way the stone says. Hitherto. Which means the help has not been in a cabinet since February 2016. It has been running underneath a man who has been too busy to itemize it, and His word puts it in the present with a word that will not stay in the past.

And I will tell you one more thing about the four hundred times, because you have started to be embarrassed about it, and you should not be. It is the Holy Spirit, not this page, who carries a sentence like that out of its own century and sets it down where you are standing.

Samuel put that stone where two roads meet on purpose. It was for other people. Everybody who came past it saw it and asked, and somebody told them, and the telling was the point. A story told four hundred times is not a man who has run dry. It is a stone doing the job stones are set up to do, and the fact that the man who set it is tired does not move the stone an inch.