The Last Ninety Miles

Exit forty comes up at about ten past nine if the traffic behaves, and the sign for it is lit from underneath so the whole thing glows orange over the trees before you can read a word of it.

Ray has run this road since he was twenty six. He knows the mile markers the way some men know hymn numbers. He knows the bad patch at seventy one where the surface goes to washboard, he knows the deer come out at the creek bottom past sixty, and he knows exit forty, because for eleven years exit forty was where the day ended and the other thing started, and the last fifty miles home after that were the ones he does not care to think about now.

Tonight it is Monday. Nothing has happened. The load went on time, the paperwork was clean, the dispatcher was decent for once. He has ninety miles left and a thermos with about two inches in it and the radio doing a call in show about a football team he has no feelings about.

Ninety miles. An hour and a half. That is all it is.

But somewhere back around a hundred and twenty, the arithmetic started. Not the miles. The other arithmetic. Next Monday there is this same run. And the Monday after. And in October the schedule changes and it gets worse. And he is fifty eight, and how many more of these are in him, and what exactly is he driving toward anyway, and the whole road out ahead of him unrolls at once, a thousand Mondays deep, and he has to carry the entire thing in a cab at nine o'clock at night with a cold thermos.

That is what puts a man in the lot at exit forty. Not the ninety miles. The thousand Mondays.

The sign comes up on the right, orange over the trees, and he takes it in with the side of his eye the way you do with something you have decided about, and the ramp goes by, and then it is behind him, and there are eighty nine miles left.

You know that stretch. Maybe it is not a road. Maybe it is the last two hours of a shift, or the stack of dishes, or the evening you have to get through before you can decently go to bed. And it is not the stretch that is heavy. It is the stretch multiplied by every one that is coming after it.

You are carrying tonight and you were never handed the thousand Mondays. Moses put it plainly in his last blessing, as thy days, so shall thy strength be, and that is an issue of supply matched to a day, not to a lifetime; that is exactly what stands written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps the measure honest, and He has never once weighed out a man's strength for a road he is not on yet.

As thy days, so shall thy strength be

Let me name the weight before I say a word about carrying it, because this weight comes disguised as being realistic.

The ninety miles is nothing. You have done ninety miles ten thousand times. What is heavy is that the ninety miles is standing in for every ninety miles that is coming, and a man on his own in the dark will do that math whether he means to or not. And there is no honest answer to it, because the truth is you cannot carry a thousand Mondays. Nobody can. You were not built with the tank for it, and the ache in your chest at mile a hundred and twenty is your body telling you the truth about a load nobody ever asked you to pick up.

Here is what Moses said over Asher at the very end of his life, when he was blessing the tribes and had nothing left to gain by exaggerating.

Thy shoes shall be iron and brass; and as thy days, so shall thy strength be.Deuteronomy 33:25

Iron and brass on the feet. Not on the shoulders. The blessing is for the walking, and the walking happens a day at a time, and the second half of it is the part I want in your ears at mile eighty nine: as thy days, so shall thy strength be. Strength issued against days. Not against the road. Not against the map. Against days, one at a time, in the amount that a day requires.

You have strength measured out for this night, and you have exactly the amount this night takes. That is the written promise in Deuteronomy 33, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the measuring, and He has never made an error in the weight of it in the whole history of the world.

Now think about what that means for the arithmetic. If strength comes matched to days, then tomorrow's strength has not been issued yet, and it cannot be. So when you sit in a cab at nine at night and try to lift next October, you are trying to lift it with tonight's ration, and of course it will not go up. It was never supposed to. You are not weak. You are trying to do a thing the supply was deliberately not designed for.

You are not failing at a weight you were never issued the strength for, and you were never scored on the load you invented. Scripture puts the measure day by day, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps handing out the day's portion rather than the road's, because a man who had the whole road's strength in his hands tonight would stop needing Him by Thursday.

And there is something else in that blessing worth having. Iron and brass shoes are not comfortable. They are not a promise that the road gets soft. They are a promise about what your feet can take. The road at seventy one is still washboard. The deer still come out at the creek. God did not promise Asher a smooth country; He promised him feet that would hold up in a rough one.

You are shod for the ground you are actually on, and you were fitted for this road and not for an easier one. The word says iron and brass, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a blessing spoken over a tribe three thousand years ago fit a man in a cab on a Monday night with eighty nine miles left.

And the plain thing, which belongs in every one of these: the friend you could call from the rest stop, the doctor, the counselor, the room with the coffee pot and the circle of chairs, that is God's kindness with a face on it. Reaching for it is not a lesser road. He has always walked people home using other people's hands.