The Cousin Who Passed Him

The garage door is rolled all the way up because it is the first warm Saturday, and there is a truck on jack stands with its hood open and a work light hanging off the latch.

A coffee can of bolts on the bench, sorted once in 2019 and never again. The radio low on a station neither of them chose. A shop rag over the older man's shoulder. His cousin is twenty six and lying half under the front end with his boots sticking out, talking the whole time, because he has always talked the whole time.

Three years ago the kid had never opened a Bible. Now his phone goes off on the bench and he slides out from under the truck to get it, and it is a guy from his shift, and the kid listens for maybe fifteen seconds and then says, hold on, brother, let me pray with you right now.

And he does. Standing in the driveway with grease to the wrist, holding the phone flat in his palm, in his ordinary voice, about that man's mother and that man's fear and the hospital in Tacoma. Forty seconds, maybe. He is not performing. There is nobody there to perform for except one cousin with a shop rag on his shoulder. Then he says amen, and puts the phone back on the bench, and gets down on the creeper again and says, can you hand me the fifteen.

The older man hands him the fifteen.

And he is glad. That is the part he would want you to know first. He is thirty nine and he is genuinely, all the way down, glad about what has happened to that kid, and if you told him to trade it back he would put you out of the garage.

Underneath the glad, though, there is something else, and it has been there a while, and he has never found a way to say it that did not sound ugly out loud. He has been in this since before that kid could read. Eighteen years of church, eighteen years of pew and offering and setting up tables, and he has never once in his life prayed out loud outside of a meal, and he could not have done what happened in that driveway, and he knows it, and the kid does not know it, and nobody is ever going to know it.

You know the wrench. Yours might be a younger sister who talks to God like He is in the passenger seat, or a guy at work who came to faith last spring and already has a group in his living room, or your own son. And you know the gladness, which is real, and the thing under it, which has never had a name you were willing to say.

Peter asked it too, out loud, on a beach

Set the wrench down a second, because I want to take you to a morning where a man asked your question straight to Jesus's face, and got an answer.

It is early. There is a charcoal fire on the sand and fish on it. Peter has just been restored, three times over, one for each denial, and told to feed the sheep and told plainly what kind of death he would die. Heavy, holy morning. And then Peter turns his head, and sees John walking along behind them, and says the most human sentence in the gospel.

Peter seeing him saith to Jesus, Lord, and what shall this man do? Jesus saith unto him, If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee? follow thou me.John 21:21-22

Notice He does not scold him for it. There is no rebuke about jealousy, no lecture. He simply refuses the comparison and hands the man back his own road. What is that to you. Follow Me.

You are on your own line with Him, and the question about the other man's pace was answered on a beach before you ever thought to ask it. That is John 21, standing exactly where it has always stood, and it is the Spirit who takes an answer given to one fisherman at breakfast and lays it over a driveway in the year you are living in.

And look at who was walking behind Peter. John, who would outlive him by decades and write things Peter never wrote. Two men, one Lord, two completely different roads, and Jesus would not let either one be laid alongside the other, not even by Peter, not even out of curiosity.

Two trees, planted the same spring

I keep ground for a living, and there is one thing about it I would give you if I could only give you one.

Plant two trees on the same slope in the same week from the same hand. One of them is in the wind gap. One is in the lee of the rock. Come back in four years and they will not be the same size, and no keeper who ever lived would stand in that yard and call the smaller one a failure, because the keeper knows what he put where, and he knows what has been coming across that gap all winter, and he is not surprised, and he has not stopped feeding it.

I have replanted a burned slope with my own hands, and it came back at four different speeds on four faces of one hill. The green came back different and it came back.

Paul says it flat out, and he says it to a church that was busy ranking its teachers.

I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase.1 Corinthians 3:6-7

Neither is anything. That is not modesty. It is a demolition of the whole ranking, and it takes your cousin off the top of the list at the same moment it takes you off the bottom of it.

You were never in a race with that kid, and Scripture has already taken the scoreboard down. It is the Spirit who gives increase where He gives it, in a twenty six year old in three years and in a thirty nine year old across eighteen, and neither number was ever a grade.

The name of the thing under the gladness

Now let me say the part that has never been sayable, and let me say it gently, because it is not what it looks like.

It is not that you begrudge him. That one has been checked a hundred times in the truck and it comes back clean every time. The thing under the gladness is not aimed at him at all. It is a verdict quietly passed on yourself, and it goes like this: three years did that in him, so eighteen should have done more in me, so something in me must not have taken.

That is the sentence. And it is arithmetic, not faith, and it does not come from anywhere in the word of God.

Here is what does come from there.

He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young.Isaiah 40:11

Gently lead. Different animals in that flock move at different speeds and the Shepherd's pace is set by the slowest one carrying the most, and that is not a concession He makes. That is how He shepherds.

You are fed by a Shepherd who sets His pace by the ones He is carrying, and that has been His way since long before you were on the slope. Isaiah wrote it down and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it a present tense sentence about you in a garage on a Saturday.

And notice what the answer is not. He does not say the eighteen years were wasted, and He does not tell you to hurry, and He does not hand you a program to catch up on. The word does not know how to say those things.

You have a Father who feeds a child at the size the child actually is, and He has never once served a portion as a reprimand. That is written all through His word, and it is His Spirit who does the feeding, at your table, at your size, this week.