Two Things in the Glovebox

The glovebox latch on that day cab gave up somewhere in Kansas, so it drops open on any hard right and everything inside slides out onto the mat. Which is how he knows the book is still in there. It comes forward every time he takes the Salina ramp faster than he ought to, taps his boot, and he pushes it back with his heel without ever looking down.

He bought it the week of the accident. Not his accident. He was third truck back, and he was the one who got down and stayed with the other driver until the county unit came, twenty-two minutes on the gravel shoulder with the hazards going, and he has never told anybody the whole of those twenty-two minutes. Thursday of that week he stopped at a plaza off I-80 and there was a wire rack by the coffee urns, and he bought one, and the girl at the register slid it into a paper sack, and it went into the glovebox.

It is in the paper sack still. That was nine years ago in March.

He is not a scoffer and he would be insulted if you called him one. He prays. Short ones, the kind a man says with both hands on the wheel. Lord, get me to Ogallala. Lord, mind my girl tonight. He would tell you flat out that he believes, and he would mean it, and he would be telling the truth.

But the book has never come out of the sack, and there is a reason underneath the reason, and it is not laziness. It is that the book belongs in the glovebox. It is an in-case item. It rides with the triangles and the extinguisher and the spare fuses, the things a man would be a fool to drive without and a fool to need.

Then February happened, at a scale house in Wyoming, in a line that was not moving.

There was a kid two trucks up, a rookie, nineteen at the outside, who had got out to walk off the cold and ended up leaning on the fender talking about nothing. And somewhere in the nothing the kid asked him, straight, no lead-up, the way nineteen asks: You religious?

He said yes. He said it easily.

And the kid said, So what has God actually done for you?

Twenty seconds. That is all it was. He stood there in the diesel smell with his gloves in his hand and went through his whole life looking for one thing he could say out loud, one thing with edges on it, and what came up was fog. He said, He has been good to me. The kid nodded, friendly enough, and the line started moving, and that was the end of it.

He drove three hundred miles that night and the sack slid forward at every ramp.

What got him was not that he had nothing. It was that what he said was completely true and worth nothing. He does believe. He has believed since he was a boy in a church with a coal stove. And he could not hand that kid one solid object out of forty-one years of it.

You have stood at that fender.

What was in the box nobody was allowed to open

The ark of the covenant had a gold lid and a rule around it that would kill a man who got casual, and inside it were three things. Look at two of them.

which had the golden censer, and the ark of the covenant overlaid round about with gold, wherein was the golden pot that had manna, and Aaron's rod that budded, and the tables of the covenantHebrews 9:4

Stone and bread.

The tables were what God said. Cut in His own hand, not open to revision, not up for a fresh vote in a hard year. The pot was what God did, in the plainest form there is: a measured amount of actual bread off an actual morning in the wilderness, sealed in a jar so a child born forty years later could be lifted up to see it and told, that is what He fed us with. Not a lesson about provision. The bread itself.

God kept both. He had the room and the authority to keep the stone alone, and He did not, because a man can hold an oath in general for a very long time and still go hungry for one morning he can point to. That is not a design flaw in the man. It is how He built him, and He stocked the box accordingly.

Now hear this said over you rather than explained to you. You have both of those already, and neither one is a thing you have to manufacture on the road tonight. Hebrews 9:4 records that God Himself judged the bread worth keeping beside the stone, and the Holy Spirit who put that line into the letter is standing beside you at the wheel to make it more than ink.

Nine years in a paper sack

I am going to be careful here, because there is a cheap sermon available at this point and I am not preaching it.

Nobody ever put the two things in that man's hands. He was given a general God and a general gratitude and a rack by the coffee urns, and he did what any honest man does with what he was given. The gap is not his failure. It is a missing part, and the fault for a missing part lies with whoever was supposed to hand it over.

And notice what has not happened in nine years. The oath did not lapse. There is no clause in it about the sack. Scripture has God confirming His promise with an oath precisely so that the people it was sworn to would have strong consolation, and the strength of that is in the swearer, not in the reader, and it has been holding at full rating the entire time the tape stayed on the sack.

You were inside this covenant nine years ago in March, on the gravel shoulder in the twenty-two minutes, and you are inside it at this hour in whatever chair you are sitting in. Psalm 105:8 says He has remembered His covenant for ever, the word He commanded to a thousand generations, and the Holy Spirit is the deposit God put inside you as His own guarantee on that sentence.

So the work tonight is not repair. It is inventory. Both parts are on site. One of them has never been unwrapped and the other has never been written down, and that is a two-line job.