The Breakdown on the Shoulder

The alternator went on US 30 about twenty-two miles east of anything, at ten past six in the evening in the middle of October, and Roy got the truck onto the shoulder on the last of the battery and set the flashers going before they died too.

Then he sat there.

It was not an emergency. That is worth saying first, because it changes the shape of the thing. He was warm enough, he had half a bottle of water and most of a bag of pretzels, and the corn on both sides had been cut so he could see a good ways. Cars went by every minute or two and the truck rocked a little each time. It was going to get dark, and it was going to be fine.

He took out his phone and started down the list.

Sixty-one contacts. He knows the number because he has looked at it more than once. Sixty-one names, and going down them is a thing he can do faster than he used to, because he has run this exact drill in a parking lot at a hardware store and in a waiting room and once in a stairwell, and the answers do not change much.

The first eleven are work. Fine men. Not men you call at six in the evening to come twenty-two miles with a set of cables. Then a dentist's office. Then a fellow he sold a boat to in the spring, who was decent about it, who is not a friend and would be baffled. Then his sister-in-law, which is a door he is not going to open, and there is nothing dramatic behind that door, it is only that it is hers and not his and he has always known the difference. Then three men he worked with at the co-op fifteen years ago whose numbers are probably dead. Then a plumber. Then a fellow from a Wednesday group he stopped going to in the spring, and Roy sat with that one a second longer than the rest, and then went past it, because you do not call somebody after seven months to ask them for a favor on a highway.

He got to the bottom of the list. He went back up and did it again, slower, which is the part he would never tell anyone about.

Then he did what he always does. He called the towing company in town and gave them the mile marker and his card number, and he sat and waited for a man he had never met to come out and be paid to do the thing that other people's friends do for nothing.

The tow truck came at eight. The driver was pleasant. Roy tipped him well, because he always does.

You know that list. Maybe yours is a phone, or maybe it is a form at a doctor's office with a line on it that says who to contact and you have written the same tired name in that space for nine years without asking them. You worked it out a long time ago and you were not even bitter about it: nobody is coming to get you, so you built a life that does not require anybody to. You were come for, on purpose, by somebody who was sent before your list ever ran out. Luke 4:18 has Him saying He was sent to set prisoners loose, and the Spirit has been saying that sending had your road in it every single time you scrolled to the bottom and started again.

Somebody was sent, and you did not arrange it

I want to stay on the shoulder with you a minute, because the temptation with a story like Roy's is to hurry to the good part and the hurry is what makes it not land.

There is a specific kind of tiredness that comes from being your own emergency contact. It is not grief and it is not self-pity, and a man carrying it will usually be the most capable person in the room. He has systems. He has a card in his wallet for exactly this. He does not complain, and if you asked him he would say he is fine and mean it. What he has quietly concluded, somewhere back down the road, is that arriving for people is a thing other people get and he does not, and he has stopped filing a complaint about it, and stopping is what makes it so hard to reach.

So look at what Jesus stands up and reads in His hometown synagogue at the beginning of everything.

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed.Luke 4:18

Read the verb in the middle. He has sent me.

Not He has permitted me. Not He is available if asked. Sent. That is a dispatch word. Somebody with authority looked at a situation, made a decision, and moved a person toward it on purpose. The captives in that sentence did not organize the sending. They were not consulted. There is no suggestion anywhere in the text that anybody blind or bruised or shut in a cell called anything in, made a list, or worked out who they could reasonably ask. The decision was made upstream of them entirely, and then somebody came.

You are the one that sending was for, and the deciding was done in a room you were never in. It is written in Luke 4:18 that the anointing came with an assignment attached to it, and the same Spirit who was on Him in that synagogue is the one carrying the sentence to you now.

He does not wait for the call to come in

Here is the second thing, and it is the one that undoes the list.

Everywhere you look in Scripture, the movement starts on His side. In Ezekiel He says it flatly: I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out, and I will rescue them from all the places where they have been scattered on a day of clouds and thick darkness, Ezekiel 34:11-12. I myself. He is speaking there against shepherds who did not go out. The whole complaint is about people who waited to be asked.

Jesus tells it as a story: a shepherd with a hundred sheep loses one, and leaves the ninety-nine, and goes after the one until he finds it, Luke 15:4. Goes after. And when he finds it, he does not lecture it about wandering off, he puts it on his shoulders and he is glad the whole way home. And then Jesus says the plainest sentence in the New Testament about His own job description: the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost, Luke 19:10.

Seek. That word does not belong to a person waiting for a phone to ring. It belongs to a person out walking a ditch line in the dark with a light.

You have been sought after by somebody who started walking before you ever thought to look for a number. Luke 19:10 says He came to seek, and the Spirit does not treat that verb as decoration in a sentence.

And I want to be careful with you here, because this is exactly where a message like this can be made cheap. I am not going to tell you that a person is about to show up. I am not going to promise you that the man from the Wednesday group is going to call this week, or that a friend is coming, or that the empty line on the form is going to get filled in by somebody warm. I do not know that and neither does anybody writing to you. What I will tell you, and stand on, is that the arrival that actually settles your standing has already happened and it was not a human one. This is yours and it is not pending: a rescue that was decided, dispatched and completed while you were still working out who to try. He promised it in Ezekiel 34:11, I myself will search for my sheep, and His Spirit has never once handed that assignment off to somebody else's schedule.