The Man Who Would Not Be Carried

The car door had been open for about forty seconds, which is a very long time for a car door.

Frank stood on the curb outside the bus station with his bag on his shoulder and his hands in his jacket pockets, and did not get in.

It was twenty to twelve. The last bus had gone at half past ten because the timetable changed in September and nobody tells anybody. His card had stopped working on Tuesday and the new one was somewhere in the postal system. He had ninety cents in actual money and a phone on eleven percent, and the station was closing up behind him, the man inside pulling the shutter halfway down and looking at him in that way that is not unfriendly and is definitely a question.

Behind him the cafe across the road had its lights on, warm and orange in the wet, and two people were laughing about something inside it.

Marcus had driven twenty minutes to get there. He had said, on the phone, straight away, no discussion, I am coming, and had put the phone down before there was any chance to argue about it. And now he was standing with his hand on the top of the open passenger door, in a coat over pajama pants, waiting.

And Frank was doing the arithmetic.

Twenty minutes there, twenty back. Gas. Marcus has work at seven. Marcus's wife had to be told something. That is a Tuesday of his life, roughly, gone on a lift from a bus station.

So the arithmetic starts, and it does not stop. He could do the fence at Marcus's mother's place, but that is only a Saturday morning and this is bigger than a Saturday morning. He could get the tickets for the game in November, except that is too much and would look like too much, and Marcus would know why he was doing it, which is somehow worse than doing nothing.

He has been like this since he was about twenty three. He is not proud of it, exactly. It is just that the world divides into people who owe and people who are owed, and he has spent thirty years making absolutely certain which side he sleeps on, because the other side is where his father lived and he watched what it did to him.

Marcus said, Frank. Get in the car.

And Frank said, I will cover you for the gas.

And Marcus said, without any heat at all, in the flat voice of a man who has known you since school, get in the car, it is twenty to twelve.

Frank got in. He put the bag between his feet and pulled the door shut and put the seat belt on and sat forward slightly, not touching the back of the seat, holding himself about an inch off it the whole way home, for forty minutes, on a road he has been driven down a hundred times.

He said thank you nine times. He counted, afterwards, lying in bed. Nine.

And it took him three days to stop working out how to level it up.

The ledger is not a character flaw

I want to be careful here, because there is a lazy version of this message that would do you harm, and it goes: you are too proud, get over it, just accept help.

That is not it. It is not even close.

A man does not build a ledger like that out of pride. He builds it out of watching. He watched somebody he loved be on the wrong side of one, and he saw what it cost them, and how the debt changed the shape of the room whenever a certain person came in. And then he decided, at about twenty three, that this would not happen to him, and it was a completely reasonable decision, and he has kept it for thirty years, and it has worked.

That is not a flaw. That is a wall built after a flood, by somebody who was there for the flood.

And your independence is not something I am here to take off you. It has held a lot of things together. It has meant that people could lean on you and never once worry about it. Nobody is asking you to become a man who lets his friends run his life. That is not the offer.

The offer is narrower than that and it is only about tonight, at twenty to twelve, in the cold, with the door open.

You are held by God on this curb, and you are not the one keeping the books on your own life. That is not me being nice about your situation. It is what is written into the way God has always dealt with people, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes that from a doctrine and makes it a thing you can actually feel with a bag on your shoulder.

And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him.Luke 10:34

The Samaritan set him on his own beast

Read what happens to the man on the Jericho road, and read it slowly, because it is a story about being carried and almost nobody reads it that way.

He is beaten and left. Two men go past. Then a stranger comes, and does five things: binds up the wounds, pours in oil and wine, sets him on his own beast, brings him to an inn, and takes care of him. And then, the next morning, pays the innkeeper and says, whatever more you spend, I will repay it when I come back.

Now find the part where the wounded man settles up.

It is not there. Jesus tells that story, in full, in front of a lawyer who is trying to get the boundaries of duty pinned down, and the wounded man does not thank anybody, does not offer anything, does not do a Saturday morning on the Samaritan's fence. He is unconscious for most of it. The only thing he does in the entire account is get carried.

And Jesus does not tell us to admire him or to pity him. He is simply the man who was carried, and the story is fine with that, and so is the Lord telling it.

You have been carried far more often than you have kept count of, and none of it went on a ledger. The written word tells the whole story of the Jericho road without ever asking what the wounded man paid, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that stop being a nice story and start being your ride home.

And here is the other half, which has to be said, because it would be dishonest to leave it out.

There is not always a Marcus. Some nights the curb is just a curb and nobody drives twenty minutes and the walk is long and cold and real, and I am not going to write as though a friend is always going to appear, because that is not everybody's life and you would know I was lying. But the Samaritan in that story is not first a lesson about our friends. He is a picture of the God who came down the road Himself. And God does not have a work schedule, a wife to explain it to, or a Tuesday to lose.

You are the one who was come to, and you were never left on the road to sort yourself out. Scripture has Him crossing the road rather than passing by, and His Spirit is the One who has been doing the binding up in your life at hours when nobody was watching.

You were carried home tonight and you did not become smaller by an inch. The written word puts a man on somebody else's animal without once calling him diminished for it, and the same Spirit who inspired Luke to write it down is the One holding your dignity in place while you sit in that passenger seat.