The Tailgate He Could Not Lift

He has the last four sacks out and the bed swept with the side of his boot, and he reaches back for the tailgate the way he has reached back for a tailgate his whole life.

It is one motion. You know it if you have ever done it. Left hand on the rail, right hand under the lip, hip into it, and the whole thing comes up and over and the latch takes with that flat sound that means the job is finished. Ten thousand times. More. He could do it holding a coffee.

Tonight it does not come up.

Not stuck. Not rusted. He checks that first, because that is what a man checks. He runs his thumb along the latch and looks at the hinge and there is nothing wrong with the hinge. He sets his feet again and takes it properly and puts his shoulder into it, and something in his lower back says no in a way that is not pain exactly, it is more like a door closing quietly in another part of the house.

So he stands there.

Hand flat on the tailgate, in the yard, in that gold light that comes across the gravel at about half past seven in September. The barn swallows are going in and out of the shop door. The wheelbarrow is where he left it against the rear wheel. And he is standing at the back of his own truck waiting for something that has come every single time he has ever asked for it, and it does not come, and he waits about four minutes, which is a long time to stand in a yard.

Then his daughter's husband comes out of the shop wiping his hands, and says something about the game, and puts the tailgate up on the way past without breaking his sentence. One motion. Flat sound. Job finished.

The boy does not notice. There is no reason he would.

And the man stands there with his hand still up where the tailgate used to be, and what goes through him is not gratitude and it is not anger and it does not have a word yet. Something happened in that yard tonight and nobody saw it and he could not explain it at dinner without sounding like he wanted something.

You know that yard. It may be a jar you handed to somebody. A flight of stairs you took in two goes with a rest in the middle and hoped nobody clocked it. A grandchild you did not pick up. Whatever yours was, you reached for a thing your body has always done and the thing was not there, and somebody handled it for you kindly and never knew, and you have been carrying it around ever since with no place to put it.

I am not going to tell you that is fine, because it is not fine, and I am not going to tell you what it means about the rest of your life, because I do not know and neither does anybody who tells you they do.

Where the strength actually lived

Wisdom is with the aged, and understanding in length of days.Job 12:12

Now read the next line, because Job did not stop there and almost every quotation of that verse does.

With God are wisdom and might; he has counsel and understanding. Verse thirteen. Job says the old have wisdom, which everybody nods along to, and then he immediately picks the whole thing up and sets it where it belongs. Wisdom is with the aged, yes, and wisdom is with God, and might is with God, and the counsel is His. Job is not paying the elderly a compliment. He is saying that every good thing anybody has ever had on loan came out of one storehouse.

I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this that gets preached and it is cruel. The cruel version says: you have lost your strength but you have gained wisdom, so it is a fair trade and you should be grateful. That is not what the text says and I will not hand it to you. Nobody standing in a yard at half past seven wants a trade. You did not want wisdom instead. You wanted the tailgate to go up.

What the text says is smaller and truer. It says the might was never in your column.

You were never the owner of what went up that tailgate, and you have not been demoted tonight. I am not saying that to talk you out of what you feel. It is what Job 12:13 says about where might lives, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes an old man's argument in an ash heap and makes it stand under a man in a farm yard. Something real ended in that gravel this evening. It was not your standing with God, because that was never issued on the strength of a back.

So let the ending be an ending. Job did. Read that book and you will find thirty-seven chapters of a man saying out loud exactly what he had lost, in detail, with his friends telling him to tidy it up, and God at the end of it turns to the friends and says they were the ones who spoke wrongly. The grief was not the sin. The tidying was.

You have permission to grieve this, and it is not a crack in your faith. The written word gives a whole book to a man's complaint without one line of rebuke for the complaining, and the Holy Spirit is not standing in that yard waiting for you to be reasonable about it. What happened tonight cost you something. You are allowed to say so.

What nobody in that yard could see

Here is the part I want to put my hand on, because it is the part that hurts and it is not the part you would name.

It was not the tailgate.

It was the four minutes. Standing there waiting for something that had never once failed to come, and finding out, in real time, in your own yard, that it was not coming. That is a specific kind of hard and it does not have a good name in English. It is not pain. It is a man discovering the exact edge of a thing he never knew had an edge.

And then the boy did it in one motion, without malice, without noticing, which is the kindest way it could possibly have gone and somehow also the worst.

You are not diminished by four minutes at the back of a truck, whatever those four minutes felt like. Job 12:13 puts might in God's hands and it does not run a second column for what a man has left in his, and the Holy Spirit is the One who keeps a person's worth out of the reach of an evening like this one. The hinge measured a body. Nothing in that yard measured you.

I will not tell you the strength comes back. I do not know that, and a man who promises you that is trading on your hope. I will not tell you to make peace with it either, because that is a verdict on your life and it is not mine to hand down. You get to take however long this takes, and you do not owe anybody in that house a settled face about it by Sunday.

You are held tonight in exactly the state you are actually in, and the holding does not wait for you to be reconciled to anything. It is written that with God are wisdom and might and counsel, all of it in His keeping and none of it in question tonight, and His Spirit is the One who makes that a real presence in a yard rather than a doctrine about one.