The Field You Drive Past

There is a bend on the county road about four miles north of where he lives, and he takes his foot off the gas every time.

He does not mean to. He is fifty one years old and he has driven that stretch maybe nine thousand times and his right foot still comes up at the same fence post, the way a horse slows at the gate it was born behind.

The field is nothing. Hay, mostly, and a stand of walnut at the far edge, and a corrugated shed somebody built badly in 1979 and never repaired. It belongs to a family named Kessler now. It belonged to somebody else then.

He was nineteen. He had wrecked a good deal of what a nineteen year old can wreck, and he had driven out there at about two in the morning because it was the only place he could think of where nobody would come looking, and he had walked out into the middle of it and lay down on his back in the stubble.

He does not tell people what happened. He has tried twice and both times it came out sounding like weather, so he stopped. What he will say, if you get him late enough in the evening, is: "I went out there one man and I come back a different one."

That was thirty two years ago.

And every one of those years he has slowed down at that fence post, and every one of those years he has driven on, and somewhere in the middle of them he stopped expecting anything and kept doing it anyway, which is a particular kind of ache that a man does not have a word for.

His wife asked him once why he always slowed there. He said the road was bad. The road is fine. It has been fine since they redid it in 2004.

He did not tell Jacob to come back to the rock

There is a man in Genesis running away from a family disaster of his own making, with nothing on him, and he stops for the night in a place the text does not even bother to name at first. He puts a rock under his head. That is how little that ground meant to anybody, including him.

And God comes.

And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.Genesis 28:16

Let that land on you before another sentence. You are standing on ground He already occupies. The word says the Lord was in that place, and it is the Holy Spirit who opens a man's eyes to what has been under him the whole time.

Sit on that last clause a minute, because it is doing the work. And I knew it not. The Lord was in that place before Jacob dreamed anything. The ladder did not install Him there. It showed a man what was already true about a piece of ground he had chosen for no reason except that he was tired.

Jacob named it Bethel and set up the stone, which was right and good. And then he left. And the God who met him at Bethel met him at Haran, and at Peniel by the ford, and in Egypt at the end, in an old man's bed, a long way from any stone he had ever set up.

Here is what is true of you while you are reading this, and it is not my line to give you. You are standing on ground He is already in. His word says heaven is His throne and the earth is His footstool, so there is no square of the county He is not standing on, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a man's eyes open to what was there the whole time.

There was a preacher in the seventeen hundreds who got his own Bethel in a small room on a street in London. His heart, he said, was strangely warmed. Everybody quotes that. Almost nobody quotes what he did afterward, which was to build a timetable and get on a horse.

He rode a quarter of a million miles. Preached in fields because they would not let him in the buildings, and in yards outside coal mines at five in the morning to men with black faces coming off shift. Set up small groups that met at a fixed hour and asked each other plain questions out loud. The name that got hung on those people started as a joke about how methodical they were, and they kept it, because it fit.

He did not build a shrine on Aldersgate Street. He built a circuit.

That is the whole thing and it is yours this evening. A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is nothing but a schedule. He held both, and he held both because he took the God of that room out on the road with him instead of leaving Him in it.

You are not required to reproduce it. Hear that, because it is what has had your foot off the gas for thirty two years. There is nothing written anywhere that says the stubble was the right address and your kitchen is the wrong one. Scripture promised that He never leaves and never forsakes, and His Spirit is the one keeping that promise on a county road at fifty five miles an hour.

And the field was real. I want to be plain about that. He met a wrecked nineteen year old flat on his back in the stubble because that was where the boy was, and He knew exactly what to do with him. He is just under no obligation to say it twice in the same field to a man who already heard it.