I Made the Call on That Job

It rained overnight and it was still spitting at six, and he stood there for what he says was about ninety seconds and then he called it and they went up.

Everybody who was there has said the same thing since, in the same words, more or less: it was the call anybody would have made. The report said the same. The insurance said the same. The man himself, when he came back to work eleven weeks later with the hardware in his arm, said it in a parking lot with his good hand on the door of the truck, and he meant it.

That was nine years ago and the foreman has run a trial on himself every morning since.

He is fifty-nine. He has been running crews since he was thirty-one and he is good at it, and men ask for him. He gets up at ten to five, which he has done all his working life, and he sits with a cup for about twenty minutes before anybody else is awake, and that is when the court sits.

He has never called it that. He would not use the word. If you asked him what he does at ten to five he would say he thinks about the day.

And people have said the thing to him. His wife has said it. The man himself said it once, years later, more directly, and it nearly took the foreman's legs out from under him. You have to forgive yourself.

And every time, in a place he has never described to anybody: he does not know what they mean.

He knows about being forgiven by God. He settled the whole thing years ago and he has not doubted it once. What he cannot locate is the second thing, the office where a man goes and does whatever this is, and gets whatever comes out of it, and knows it is done. Nobody has ever been able to tell him where it is, mostly because nobody has ever been asked.

Maybe you have been told to forgive yourself. And maybe you nodded, and went out to the truck, and had no idea on this earth what you were being asked to actually do, and put the not knowing on the pile with everything else.

Sit down on the tailgate. Nothing coming is going to hand you a procedure.

There is no second office

Let me put it the way an old preacher on a porch would, and it may take you a day to decide whether it is a relief or an insult.

That office does not exist.

Not hard to find. Not further along. Not something a better man would have got to by now. It is not there. Nowhere in Scripture does a man forgive himself. Nobody does it, nobody is told to, and the phrase does not appear anywhere in the book. It came into ordinary speech within the last hundred years, usually out of the mouths of decent people trying to name something real, and the thing they are pointing at exists, but it is not a second pardon.

You have not been failing at anything, and Scripture never once puts a second forgiveness between a man and his rest, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept you unable to find a building that was never put up. Nine years of not completing an errand that cannot be run is not a defect in you. That is the right answer.

He canceled the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This He set aside, nailing it to the cross.Colossians 2:14

Look at where the record went. Not amended. Not marked paid in a drawer somewhere for reference. Nailed to a cross, which is a public thing, done once, in front of everybody, and not something that can be quietly retrieved and reread at ten to five in the morning. You are standing on a record that was taken out of the file and driven through, and Colossians 2 is where that is written, and it is His Spirit and not your twenty minutes with a cup who reports on where it went.

What ten to five has actually been

So if the office does not exist, what have nine years been? Something real. It has a name, and the name is not forgiveness.

A court has been in session.

It sits every morning. There is a bench and you sit on it. There is a defendant, and it is also you. There is a prosecutor with the whole file who can give you the weather, the hour, the ninety seconds, and exactly what was being weighed while a man stood there, and who never once reads out the report or the insurance or what the man said in the parking lot with his good hand on the truck. He is you as well. There is no defense, because when one comes up you throw it out as a man making excuses. And there has never been a verdict, because a court with no jurisdiction cannot deliver one. It can only sit again tomorrow at ten to five.

That is what nine years has been. Not an unfinished forgiveness. A trial that cannot end, in a kitchen with no authority in it.

You were never appointed to that bench, and 1 Corinthians 4 says Paul would not judge even himself but left it to the Lord, and it is the Spirit who lifts a man out of a chair he was never qualified to sit in. If Paul stepped down out of that seat, it was never built for a foreman with a cup.

Not a step to add, a bench to get off

Here is the turn, and it is a subtraction.

The trouble was never a second thing left undone. It is a first thing that was never yours to do: holding open a case God has closed. And a man cannot close a case he had no authority to open in the first place. What he can do is stand up and go out to the truck.

So the move is not to forgive yourself. The move is to say out loud that you are not the judge in this, and then to say who is. That is all of it. There is no technique, no wording to get right, and it will not feel like anything you have accomplished. It is a man getting off a bench and walking out of a room that was never a court.

You have a case that was closed by the only judge with standing in it, and it is written that there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit is what makes that a fact about a man who stood in the wet for ninety seconds and made a call.