Four in the Morning at the Weigh Station

Four in the morning at a weigh station off the interstate and the phone lights up on the dash.

It is the dispatch message. Route change, drop moved to the far side of the city, tomorrow now looks like the day after. And at the bottom, because the man who sends these is a good man and always signs off the same way: "Blessed and highly favored, brother."

He reads it twice. The heater is doing that ticking thing. Outside there is orange sodium light on wet concrete and the sound of a reefer unit two bays down, and past the lot there is nothing but dark and the sound of the road.

Blessed and highly favored.

This is night nineteen. Nineteen nights since he has slept in a bed that is his, nineteen mornings since he has heard his own back door, and the youngest has learned something new in that time that he found out about from a video. His wife sends the videos and does not say anything about the nineteen, which is worse than if she did.

The truck has an issue with the air system that he is nursing rather than fixing because fixing it means two days off the road. His knee has an issue too and he is nursing that the same way and for the same reason.

Blessed and highly favored, brother.

He puts the phone face down on the dash. He is not angry. You cannot be angry at a man for signing a message. But there is a thing that happens in his chest when he reads it that he has stopped trying to give a name to, and it happens most nights now, and it is not gratitude.

If you have ever been handed that phrase, on a screen or from a platform or in a parking lot, and had to hold it up next to the actual week you were having, you know exactly what is happening in that cab. Somewhere under the tiredness there is a sentence he would never type back: if I am highly favored, then I would hate to see what the other thing looks like.

The word does not mean the run went well

Let me get up in the passenger seat for a minute and say the low thing first, because it has been riding with you a while.

The trouble is not the nineteen nights. You have done nineteen nights before and you did not have this in your chest. The trouble is that a good word is being said over the nineteen nights and it makes the nineteen nights look like a report card. Blessed, in the mouth of a sign off, means: things are going well for you. So when things are not going well, the word turns into a small nightly question about whether you are actually any good at this, at your marriage, at being a man, at faith.

So let me give you the word as it was written, and I picked this one because the man who wrote it was thinking about weather.

Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly. And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither.Psalm 1:1-3

Read what is actually in that picture. A tree. A river. Roots. There is no mention of the sky. There is no promise about rainfall. The whole thing hangs on one word, which is planted, and planted describes where the roots ended up and not what the weather is doing to the branches.

Jeremiah takes the same picture up later and makes it plainer, and he puts a drought in it. Heat comes. There is a year of drought. And the leaf is still green, not because the weather changed but because the roots are in something the weather does not reach.

That is the meaning of the word. Blessed is God's favor sitting on a person, His face turned that way, the roots down in Him. It is not a description of the run. You have roots in water tonight, at four in the morning, on night nineteen, and the drought above ground has not reached down to them once. Psalm 1 puts the whole case on where the tree is planted rather than on the season it is having, and it is the Holy Spirit whom Jesus called living water who is the river that psalm is talking about.

Two words got the same spelling. Favored is one thing. Comfortable is another. You have been reading the second one off a dispatch message for a year and it has been quietly costing you.

In his season, and not in yours

There is a clause in that psalm that most people drive past and it is the one I want you to sit with.

He bringeth forth his fruit in his season.

Not on schedule. Not on request. Not on the same timetable as the man in the next bay whose life looks straightforward from the outside. In his season, which is a phrase that puts the calendar somewhere other than in your hands and leaves it there.

That should be a hard sentence and it is actually a kind one, because it means the months where nothing is coming off the branches are not months where the tree has failed. A tree in February is not a bad tree. It is a tree in February.

You are not producing nothing, you are in a season, and God has never once confused the two. Psalm 1 says in his season, which is Scripture handing the timing to God on purpose, and it is the same Spirit who brings fruit in a person over time rather than on demand, so what is slow in you is not evidence against you.

And I want to name what the psalm does not do, because it matters. It does not say the drought is a gift. It does not say the heat came for your good. It does not say you should be thankful for February. It says the leaf does not wither, and it tells you why, and the why is the river and not the weather.

You have a leaf that is still green after nineteen nights, and staying green is the evidence, not the size of the crop. Jeremiah 17:8 puts it exactly that way, green in the drought year, and His Spirit is the one keeping something alive in a man at four in the morning that nineteen nights should have finished off by now.

What I am not going to tell you

Now I am going to be straight with you about what this is not, because you have been sold things before on a lot at four in the morning and you can smell it coming.

I am not telling you the run gets easier. I do not know that. I am not telling you the drop gets moved back or the air system holds or the knee sorts itself out. I would be lying, and a tired man does not need one more person guessing out loud in a confident voice.

I am also not telling you the nineteen nights are secretly a blessing. They are not. They are nineteen nights and they are costing you and your wife something real, and dressing that up as a gift would be the second ditch and it is the more comfortable one to fall in. Nobody sent you the nineteen. The drought is a drought.

Both halves. Hold them both. Your hard season is not the withdrawal of God's favor, and your hard season is not the favor in a costume.

You are favored right now and the run is still the run, and those two facts are allowed to be in the same cab. The written word puts a blessed man and a drought year in the same sentence without apologizing for either, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a man able to hold both without one of them canceling the other.