The Beer Tent at the County Fair

The fair runs Thursday to Sunday and the big tent is the one at the far end past the tractor pulls, and the board outside it says SATURDAY 8PM and then the name of the band, and Dale has known that band's name since he was twenty two.

They do not play much anymore. Two of them are near seventy. The mandolin player taught his cousin. He has seen them maybe forty times in his life and he could tell you about eleven of those nights, and the eleven he could tell you about are all a long time ago and most of them happened in that tent.

That is the whole shape of the problem. It is not that there is drink at the fair. There is drink at the gas station. It is that the good thing and the hard room are the same address, and always have been, and every memory he has of that band is standing in a crowd in that tent with a cup in his hand.

He wants to go. That is the part that makes him tired. If he did not want to go he would stay home and mow.

His wife asked him Tuesday if he was going and he said he had not decided, which was not exactly a lie, and she left it alone, which he was grateful for and also not.

It is Thursday. The tent is up. He drove past the field on the way back from town and saw the canvas.

You know that tent. It might be a wedding, a club, a room where the thing you love has been happening for thirty years. It is not temptation in the abstract. It is a specific good thing that lives in a specific hard room, and the two of them cannot be separated.

You have light and salvation as a Person and not as a plan, and you were never sent to that field with a strategy instead of a Presence. Psalm 27 says the Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear, and the answer to fear in that verse is not an argument, it is God Himself; the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that plain to a man who drove past a field and saw canvas.

The Lord is the strength of my life

Let me put the ache into plain words, because it is one of the lonelier ones and it does not get much sympathy.

You are not being asked to give up something bad. You gave that up. What is on the table here is a good thing: music you love, played by men who will not be playing much longer, in the one county you have lived your whole life in. And it is housed under a canvas roof where every version of you that ever stood in it had a cup in his hand. There is no clean answer to that, and anybody who gives you a quick one has not understood the question.

So here is where David starts, and notice that he does not start with a plan.

The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? the Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?Psalm 27:1

Three names and two questions. Light. Salvation. Strength of my life. And then the questions, and the questions are not rhetorical decoration; they are the only argument he offers. He does not answer fear by explaining why the situation is fine. He answers it by naming who is present and letting the size of that do the work.

You have the Lord as the strength of your life, and you were never running on the strength of your own resolve out in that field. That is what stands written in Psalm 27, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a name into an actual supply under a canvas roof at eight in the evening.

Now look at my light. A light does not remove the field. It does not take the tent down or move the bar. It changes what a man can see while he is standing in it, which is the whole difference between walking into a dark room and walking into a lit one that has exactly the same furniture in it.

You are walking into a lit room, and you were never asked to find your way around it in the dark by memory. Scripture calls Him light before it calls Him anything else in that psalm, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the lighting in a tent full of people at the far end of a fairground.

And read what David asks for two verses later, because it is not what you would expect. One thing have I desired, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life. In the middle of a psalm about enemies and armies, what he wants is to be somewhere, with somebody, continuously. He is not asking to be extracted from the trouble. He is asking to be housed with God inside it.

You are housed with Him wherever you go, and you were never going to be posted somewhere He is not. The written word has him asking to dwell rather than to escape, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a man's own company at a county fair something he is not required to leave behind at the gate.

And the plain things, and I will say them the way I would say them across a fence. You do not owe anybody at that fair one word of explanation. If you go and want to leave after four songs, leave after four songs, and that is not a failure, that is a man going home. And if the friend who knows, the doctor, the counselor, or the room in the church basement on a Tuesday is what makes Saturday possible, use them. That is God's kindness with a face on it, and reaching for it is not a weaker faith.