Turning A Truck On A Narrow Road

Dewey missed the turn at the bridge because he was thinking about something else, which is how every one of these starts.

It was the second week of March and the light was already going. He did not notice for about a mile. County road, blacktop, painted line, nothing to tell a man he is wrong.

Then the line quit.

Then the blacktop narrowed to the width of one vehicle, with a cut bank on his right side and a drop down to the creek on his left, and Dewey Ratliff looked at the mirrors on a truck with a twenty foot bed behind it and understood the arithmetic of his afternoon.

There was no place to turn. Not a wide spot, not a pull off, not a gate to back into. Just road, going up.

So he kept going.

That is the part people get wrong about a man on a wrong road. They think he is stubborn. He is not stubborn. He is doing the possible thing. Turning is impossible and forward is possible, and a man will do the possible thing for hours if you let him.

Seven miles. The blacktop gave out to gravel. The gravel wore down to two ruts with a green stripe up the middle of them. A branch took his mirror bracket and he did not stop for it. Dark was coming on the way it does in a hollow, from the bottom up.

He was thinking, the whole seven miles, about eleven years of things he was sorry for. He was good at sorry. It was the one thing he had genuinely gotten better at. He could get through the whole list in about four minutes and he had done it maybe nine times since the bridge, and he was not one inch nearer home than when he started, because the list has never once been a steering wheel.

Then, headlights on a hay barn. A mown lot. And a man in a barn coat standing at the end of his own driveway with one hand up.

Dewey rolled the window down and said the sentence he had been rehearsing since the line quit.

"I've come too far to get this thing turned around."

The man looked at the truck, and at the lot, and back at the truck.

"Not on your own you can't," he said. "Cut it hard right and come on back to me."

And then he walked around behind the truck and stood where Dewey could see him in the mirror, in the last of the light, and called him back. Cut it hard. Come on. Come on. Stop. Forward two feet. Cut it the other way now. Come on.

It took nine moves. It might have been eleven. Dewey lost the count somewhere around six.

And that is the thing he told people about afterward, when he told it at all. Not that the turn happened. That the man at the back of the truck never once counted out loud.

When the nose came around and the headlights were finally pointed back down the hollow the way he had come, Dewey sat there with both hands on the wheel and his heart going and did not drive off for a minute.

The man came up and knocked twice on the door with his knuckles.

"Bridge is four mile," he said. "You'll see it."

And went in to his supper.

Nobody counted the moves

There is a word for what happened in that hay lot, and it is not sorry.

Sorry is what Dewey did for seven miles at forty miles an hour going the wrong direction. The word Scripture uses is return, and it is a word about a nose and a set of headlights, not about a feeling in a chest.

Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the LORD, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.Isaiah 55:7

Notice what is not in that verse. There is no distance in it. There is no clause about how far up the road a man got before he thought better of it, and no scale on which seven miles counts against him and half a mile does not.

You are not too far along this road for the turn to be made, and the reason has nothing to do with your mileage. Isaiah 55:7 puts the mercy on His side of the sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit, not my saying so, who takes a promise of abundant pardon and makes it feel like an open lot instead of a lecture.

Here is the second thing, and for a lot of people it is the whole thing. Read the prophets on this and see who is doing the pulling.

Hosea says come, let us return unto the LORD, for He hath torn and He will heal us. Joel says turn to Me with all your heart, and then, before anybody can go get their good clothes, he says rend your heart and not your garments, because the God at the other end of that turn is gracious and merciful and slow to anger and of great kindness. Jeremiah 31:3 says it flat out: I have loved thee with an everlasting love, therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.

Drawn. Somebody is at the back of the truck.

You are being drawn right now, and that pull you keep mistaking for guilt is a good deal kinder than you have been reading it. His word says lovingkindness is the rope. His Spirit has the other end of it, and He has had it the whole time you have been sitting there with the engine running.

The son in the story Jesus told had a speech ready. He had worked on it in a field with the hogs and it was a good speech, honest and humble and about what he no longer deserved. He never got to finish it. His father saw him a long way off and ran, which is not what a man of that age and standing did in that country, and the speech was cut in half by an old man's arms.

Nobody counted his moves either.

You have a Father who runs, and the running started before you had your first sentence out. That is written in Luke 15:20 and it is the same Spirit who put that scene in the Gospel who is putting it in front of you now, at whatever hour you are reading this.

And now the geometry, because this is where most people are stuck and it is a lie about arithmetic rather than a lie about God.

Dewey did not have to undo seven miles in order to turn. He turned where he sat. The seven miles then got driven back down the hollow at ordinary speed with the radio on, and they took the same amount of time going back as they took coming up, and every foot of that was after the turn, not before it.

The turn is not the journey home. The turn is nine moves in a hay lot with a man calling you back. The going home is just driving.

And if you have made this turn before, twice, or nine times, or every January since you were nineteen, hear this carefully. The man behind the truck did not count. That is not a soft thing to say to make you feel better. It is the character of the God who says His mercies are new every morning, which is a sentence that only makes sense if somebody expected them to run out.

You have a turn available to you today that is not a smaller or a cheaper turn because it is not your first. Lamentations 3:22 says His compassions fail not, and it is His Spirit who keeps a person from doing arithmetic that God is not doing.