The Eleven People I Had To Tell

Wendell did it in the yard because he could not do it in the office.

The office had a door and he could not stand the idea of them coming in one at a time and going back out past the others, so he did it in the yard at half seven on a Tuesday, all of them at once, standing on the concrete in the cold with their tea.

Eleven people. Nineteen years.

One of them had been there seventeen of the nineteen. One of them was twenty-three and had a baby coming in April. One of them, Dennis, said right in a way that Wendell will hear for the rest of his life, and then put his cup down on the wall and went and started clearing his tools out before Wendell had finished speaking, not out of anger, just because that was the next thing to do and Dennis was a man who did the next thing.

That was three years ago in March.

The business went under and he does not intend to explain the reasons here. Some of them were his and some of them were not, and he has been over all of it more times than a man should, and the arithmetic does not come out differently on the four hundredth pass.

What he cannot get past is not the money. The money resolved, eventually, badly but finally.

It is standing on the concrete.

It arrives when he is driving. It arrives most reliably when he sees any one of them, which happens, because it is not a big place. They are all fine. Two of them are doing better than they were. One of them shook his hand at a funeral last year and said something generous.

None of that touches it.

Because in the yard, at half seven, eleven people who had trusted him found out that the trust had been misplaced, and there is no version of the last three years in which Wendell has been able to stop being the man on the concrete.

You might have your own yard.

Maybe you had to tell people. Maybe it was one person. Maybe it was a business, or a ministry, or a marriage, or a thing you had promised somebody you would hold.

What I am not going to do with this

Let me be plain with you before anything else, because a man in your position has usually had a lot said to him.

I am not going to tell you God did this. I do not believe it, I will not write it, and if it has been said to you, it was wrong.

I am not going to ask you what you learned. Not one word of that. You have been asked and you have probably answered politely, and it is a small cruelty asked of a man still standing on concrete in his own head.

I am not going to tell you it was for the best or that a door closed and another one opened. Two of them are doing better and that is genuinely good and it does not make the yard into a good morning.

And I am not going to sort out whose fault it was. I was not there, I do not know your trade, and a stranger who assigns blame from a distance is worth nothing to you either way.

I have one thing, and it is about who was standing on that concrete.

The sentence with the double negative

There is a line in Hebrews that in the original is emphatic to the point of being almost ungrammatical, piling up negatives to make it as absolute as language allows.

I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.Hebrews 13:5

And look at what it is attached to, because the context matters and almost nobody quotes it.

That verse comes immediately after an instruction about being content with what you have. It is written to people who were losing things, and who had had property taken from them, and the never leave thee is the ground under exactly that.

It is not a promise about circumstances. There is no clause in it about the business, or about anybody keeping anything. It is a promise about company, given specifically to people whose circumstances had gone.

And He did not leave the yard and He has not left the three years since. The written word makes it absolute and attaches it to people who were losing things, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a man who cannot stop standing on concrete.

And you are not standing in this on your own. The word piles up the negatives to say it as strongly as it can be said, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit in a truck at seven in the morning.

The man you cannot stop being

Now here is the part I want to touch carefully, because I think it is the actual wound and it is not the one people ask about.

You have not been unable to forgive yourself. That is what people would say and it is not quite right.

You have been unable to stop being him. The man on the concrete at half seven is not a memory, he is a location, and you go back and stand there several times a week without meaning to.

I am not going to tell you to stop, because you have tried and it does not work like that.

I am going to tell you who else is standing there.

And He was on that concrete at half seven and He did not arrive later. The word says the LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit, and the Spirit is the one who makes nigh mean where you actually are rather than where you would like to be.

And nothing about you is under review. The word says there is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that in a man who has run the arithmetic four hundred times.