You Were Already On The Crew

At ten to six in the morning, in the dark, in the passenger seat of a van outside a community hall, Nico was studying.

He had the sheet on his knees. Laminated, corners gone soft, a coffee ring on it from somebody's cup two years ago. Load in order down the left, rigging procedure down the right, radio channels along the bottom in a smaller font. He had photographed it on his phone on the Tuesday and he had been reading it in bed since, and he could now recite the order of the road cases the way other people recite a psalm.

He was nineteen. He had been told on the Tuesday that he had the job.

He did not believe it. Not really. What he believed, underneath everything, was that Tuesday had been a provisional sort of yes, and that the actual hiring would happen somewhere between six in the morning and the end of the day, depending on whether he could get through it without anybody having to explain anything to him twice.

So he was going to know the sheet. That was the plan. He was going to be the one nobody had to tell.

At six the side door of the hall went up with a bang and the lights came on inside and Delfina came down the ramp in a puffer jacket with a radio in each hand, and she gave one of them to him without breaking stride.

"Channel two. Do not turn it off to save the battery, everybody does that and then nobody can find them."

Nico did not take it straight away.

"I have not learned all of it yet," he said, and he lifted the laminated sheet slightly, which was, he realized as he did it, the most nineteen year old thing he had ever done in his life.

Delfina stopped. She looked at the sheet, and then at him, with the expression of a woman who has met this exact boy about forty times.

"You are on the crew," she said. "Your name went on the call sheet on Tuesday, and I ordered the shirts on the Friday before that, which means I was thinking about you last week. That thing in your hand is not how you get hired." She put the radio into his palm and folded his fingers over it. "It is how you do not drop a light on Marisol's head. Different document entirely."

He got a thing wrong at about eleven. He coiled a long cable the wrong way, over and under, which is a real mistake and not a small one, and he stood there with it in his hands going hot in the face and waiting.

Delfina took one end and showed him. She talked him through it twice and made him do it a third time on his own, and it took four minutes, and the whole time some part of Nico was braced for the sentence at the end that would begin look, this is not working out.

It never came. It was not that kind of conversation. It was the same instruction he had been given on the Tuesday, given again, by a woman who had already decided to keep him.

At the end of the day, loading out, he went down the side of the truck where the hooks are, the row of them with names written on in white paint pen for the harnesses and the belts. Ten hooks. Nine names he had heard shouted across a stage all day.

And at the end, the tenth one, NICO, and the paint was not wet. It had been dry for a week.

He answered the question with a rescue story

There is a moment in Scripture where somebody asks the exact question that has been running underneath your reading, and it is worth watching how carefully the answer is built.

A child is told to ask it, in fact. When your son asks you in time to come, saying, what mean the testimonies and the statutes and the judgments which the LORD our God has commanded you? Moses gives the parents the answer to give, and every parent in that generation would have had it by heart.

Watch what the answer is not. It is not: because God said so. It is not: because that is what we do. It is not a defense of the rules and it is not an argument.

Then thou shalt say unto thy son, We were bondmen in Egypt, and the LORD brought us out with a mighty hand.

That is the answer. The answer to what do the rules mean is a story about being carried out of a place you could not leave. The instruction is explained by the rescue, and the rescue is told first, and only then does the sentence go on: and the LORD commanded us to do all these statutes, for our good always.

For our good always. The instruction has a purpose written into it in the same breath, and the purpose is the good of the person receiving it.

You are inside the house before a single line of it is explained to you. Deuteronomy 6 puts the rescue in front of the requirement on purpose, and the Holy Spirit keeps that order from turning over in you when everything in your training wants to flip it back.

Because most of us were handed it the other way around. Somebody, meaning well, opened the book at the rules and never read us the paragraph above them, and so the whole thing arrived as a specification for a person we were supposed to become before God would be interested. Read that way, every page is an audit. Read that way, you cannot open it in the morning without doing arithmetic on yourself, and eventually you stop opening it, and you tell yourself that is about being busy.

Now hear Paul, a man who had been broken open by this subject, saying the plainest thing anybody says about it in the whole New Testament.

Wherefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and good.Romans 7:12

Holy, and just, and good. He does not say it is a trap. He does not say it is the enemy. He says it is good, and he says it after everything he has been through with it, which is the testimony of a man who has finally seen the thing in the right hands.

You have never been handed a scorecard by God, and Romans 7:12 calls the instruction good rather than punitive, and His Spirit is the witness in you that a good Father does not hide a fee inside a gift.

David, who knew every kind of trouble a person can get into, wrote that the law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul, and that these things are more to be desired than gold, yea, than much fine gold, sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb. That is not a man describing an examination. That is a man describing something he is glad to have.

Let me say clearly what this message is not going to do, because you have probably been ambushed by it before. I am not going to tell you which parts are binding on you today and which are not. That argument is a real one and it belongs in another room with people who love each other, and it is not what is hurting you tonight. What is hurting you tonight is that you have been reading a father's handwriting as a hiring policy. Nobody can fail this. There is no exam here to fail.

You are already His while you are still learning it, and that is not my kindness, it is the order Scripture itself keeps. The same Spirit who put that order in the book is in the van with you at ten to six in the morning, and He teaches inside a house rather than at the door of one.