Boots Still On

The porch boards go blue about twenty minutes before they go gold, and Wendell has been awake for both, lying on the swing seat with his boots still on and one arm gone dead underneath him.

The truck is in the yard at an angle no man parks a truck at on purpose. There is a bag of feed in the bed that should have gone in the barn. The dog has come and sat down next to the swing and has been there for a while, patient in the way an old dog is patient, and every so often puts her chin on the boards and sighs.

The house is right there. Twelve feet. The kitchen light is not on yet, which means Carol is not up, which means there is a window of about half an hour where nothing has to be explained to anybody.

He does not move because he cannot yet look at the door.

Last night is mostly there and partly not, and the part that is not is doing more damage than the part that is. And underneath it, running its own steady sermon, is the sentence that always shows up on this particular morning: everything you have done since the last one is now worth nothing, and everybody who trusted you was wrong to, and here is the proof lying on a porch swing with his boots on.

The light comes up over the far fence line and the boards go from blue to gold in about a minute and a half.

Let me stop and talk to you straight, because if this is your morning you did not come here for a story.

I am not going to ask you how long it had been. Nobody here is counting anything and nobody is going to. I am not going to say one word about starting over, because you are not standing at a start line, you are a grown man on a porch in the middle of a real life. And I am not going to tell you what last night says about you, because it does not say what it is telling you it says, and I am not adding one ounce to what is already on you.

You are the one the word calls a riser, and you were named that before this morning ever happened. Proverbs says a just man falls seven times and rises up again, which puts the falling inside the description rather than outside it; the Holy Spirit is the one who gets that off a page and onto a porch at first light.

A just man rises

Let me name the weight first, because a man will carry a thing for years rather than say what it is.

It is not the headache and it is not the truck. It is that this morning has been presented to you as a verdict on your whole character, delivered with evidence, before you were even properly awake. And a man under a verdict cannot look at a door. That is not weakness. That is what a verdict does to anybody.

So look at what Solomon actually wrote, and count the words in it.

For a just man falleth seven times, and riseth up again: but the wicked shall fall into mischief.Proverbs 24:16

Read it slow. The just man is not the one who does not fall. The just man is the one described falling seven times. Seven is the fullness number in that book; it is not a limit, it is a way of saying as many times as it takes. And the second half of the sentence is what he does after: riseth up again.

You are being described by that verse and you were not being excluded by it, and the falling is inside the description. That is written into Proverbs 24, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ancient proverb land on a man with one arm gone dead under him and a bag of feed still in the truck bed.

Now, the contrast at the end is the part everybody misses. It does not say the wicked fall and the just do not. It says the just man falls and gets up, and the wicked fall into mischief, which means they stay in it and it becomes the place they live. The dividing line in that verse is not whether a man goes down. It is what happens next.

You are on the right side of that line this morning, and you were on it the second you woke up caring. Scripture puts the difference in the rising and not in the record, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a man who cannot look at a door yet understand which half of that proverb he is standing in.

And there is one more thing, and it is in the word just. That word does not mean a man who has behaved. It means a man in right standing, and in the whole sweep of the book that standing comes from God and not from a run of good weeks. So the verse is not saying the good stay good. It is saying that a man who belongs to God is a man who gets up, and the getting up is what the word calls him, not the ground he got up off.

You have right standing that last night could not touch, and you have it because it was never issued on the basis of your performance in the first place. The written word calls him a just man in the middle of describing him falling, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a man from confusing what he did with what he is.

And now the plain thing, and I am putting it right here in the middle of the article, not down at the bottom. If your body is rough this morning, go and see a doctor today, and tell them the truth about what you have been drinking. Do not make decisions about your body or about stopping on your own. That is not a lack of faith, that is what a sensible man does. And past that: the friend who already knows, the counselor, the room in the church basement on a Tuesday, the number you can call, all of it is God's kindness with a face on it, and a man reaching for it is not a man failing. He has been walking people home through other people's hands since the beginning.