The Night On The Back Road

It is a back road he has driven perhaps four thousand times.

Nine miles, two bad bends, a farm gate, a dip where the water sits after rain. He could drive it asleep and on two occasions he very nearly has.

And there is a stretch of it, about two hundred yards long between the second bend and the gate, that he cannot drive through without something happening in his chest.

Eleven years.

He has never told a soul. Not his wife, who he tells everything, and who would not laugh at him. Not the man he has known since school. Nobody.

If you got him at a tailgate at the end of a day and asked him directly, he would probably say it was tiredness. He was very tired that night and it was late and it had been a bad month, and tired men on dark roads have all sorts of things happen in their heads, and he knows that.

And then, if you did not fill the silence, he would say the other thing.

Which is that he stopped the truck. In the middle of the road, at midnight, on a road nobody else was on, and he sat there with the engine running for about twenty minutes and he could not have told you why then and cannot now.

And that ever since, he takes the long way when he has got somebody in the cab with him.

Eleven years of a two hundred yard detour that nobody has ever noticed.

Now let me ask you.

Which ordinary place in your life is not ordinary any more?

Jacob woke up and said the plainest thing in the book

There is a man running away from his family with a very bad conscience and no plan, and it gets dark, and he stops because it is dark and not because the place is anything.

Genesis is careful to say that. It says he stopped there because the sun had set. It was not a chosen spot. It had nothing to recommend it. He put a stone under his head, which tells you exactly what kind of night it was.

And in the morning he says this.

When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, Surely the Lord is in this place, and I was not aware of it. He was afraid and said, How awesome is this place!Genesis 28:16 and 17

Look at what he says first and what he says second. The knowing came before the fear and neither one was a mistake. You are not a tired man who invented something, and the Holy Spirit has never limited Himself to the places a man would have picked.

Two sentences and they are both worth having.

I was not aware of it. That is a man saying that the place had been what it was the whole time and the only new thing was his knowing.

And then, straight after: he was afraid.

Not delighted. Not triumphant. He does not come down the hill announcing anything. His first reaction to having been somewhere God was is fear, and the Bible reports it flatly without treating it as a failure of faith.

Now, what does he actually do about it?

He takes the stone he had under his head, sets it upright, pours oil on it, and gives the place a name. That is the whole of it. He does not build anything, he does not gather anybody, he does not go back and tell his brother.

He marks it and he goes on with his journey.

Hear where you stand, out here at a tailgate.

You are not a tired man who imagined something on a dark road. Scripture puts the Lord was in this place and I was not aware of it in the mouth of a man who had stopped there only because it got dark, and the Spirit has not once restricted Himself to the places a person would have chosen.

And I will say the plain thing, because that is how we talk out here.

The tiredness explanation might be right. I am not going to take it off you and I am not going to tell you what happened on that road, because I was not there and neither was anybody else who will ever read this.

But notice that you have never once acted like a man who believes the tiredness explanation. A man who thinks he imagined something does not take a two hundred yard detour for eleven years.

You have believed it the whole time. You have just never said it, and the not-saying has done its own work, which is that the thing has grown enormous in the dark, the way anything does when it is never brought out and looked at in daylight.

The word says Jacob set up a stone and poured oil on it and went on with his journey. Marking a thing is not the same as building a shrine to it.

But you are not a tired man who invented something. Genesis 28 says the Lord was in that place and the man was not aware of it, and he had stopped there only because the sun went down, and the Spirit He poured out has never restricted Himself to the places anybody would have chosen.