The Lull in the Garage

Saturday afternoon and the bonnet is up, which is where Karim is happiest, and his brother-in-law Sami is under the front of the car on a piece of cardboard with only his boots showing, swearing gently at a bolt. The radio on the shelf is playing something old. There is a cooler by the garage door and it is full of cans, and the cans are lemonade, and nobody has said anything about that, which is its own kind of kindness. His hands know this engine. He learned it on a car exactly like it, in a garage exactly like it, a long time ago, and there is a peace in the wrench and the rag and the smell of oil that he does not have anywhere else in the week.

Then Sami slides out and says he needs the other socket set, the one in the house, and goes.

And there is a lull.

Karim knows the lull. It used to come at six o'clock, most days, in the ten minutes between getting home and the first drink, and it had a weight and a shape and it was always the same, and then the drink came and put it out like a lamp. He has not had the drink for a while now. Nobody counts and he is not counting either. But here is the thing nobody told him: the lull did not go when the drink went. The lull is standing in the garage with him at four in the afternoon, and there is nothing to put it out with, and it is exactly as heavy as it ever was.

He puts the spanner down. He does not know what to do with his hands. The thing underneath, the actual thing, the ache with no name that the drink was sitting on top of for years, is here, in daylight, in front of an engine, with the radio playing, and he cannot cover it and he cannot fix it, and for one long moment he thinks he cannot bear it either.

Sami comes back with the socket set. He looks at Karim's face and he does not ask a question. He puts the box down, turns the crate over, sits on it next to him, and picks up the other spanner. And says nothing. For a long time. Two men and an engine and the radio and the thing that has arrived.

You did the hard thing. You took it away. And everything it was covering is still here, and it is heavier now because there is nothing between you and it, and everybody keeps congratulating you and nobody can see that you are standing in a garage in daylight in front of the thing with no cover.

You are standing in front of something that has already been carried, and you were never the first one to pick it up. Isaiah 53:4 says surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, and that is exactly what stands written; the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a sentence about somebody else’s shoulders into a fact about a man on a crate in a garage.

Met, not managed

Let me say first what I am not going to do, because enough has been done to you already.

I am not going to tell you what the thing underneath is. I do not know, and a man who tells you what your ache is from a distance is guessing and calling it insight. I am not going to trace it back to anything, or tell you why you drank, or draw a line from the ache to the bottle and back again. And I am not going to tell you that dealing with this is what keeps you sober, because I do not know that and neither does anybody who says it. The ache is not a job. It is not a step. It is a thing that is here, and it deserves to be met on its own terms and not recruited for a purpose.

Here is what happens instead, and you already know it, because it is what happens every time the thing arrives. Everybody offers management. Breathe. Go for a walk. Journal it. Call someone. Distract yourself until it passes. And listen, some of that is good, and some of the people who say it love you, and I want to say plainly that a meeting, a counselor, a doctor, an honest friend on the crate beside you, all of those are good things and God is in every one of them; I would never set faith against help. But underneath all the managing there is a thing in you that does not want to be managed. It wants to be met. It wants someone to sit down on the crate and not ask a question.

Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.Isaiah 53:4

Read the verbs. Borne. Carried. Not explained. Not treated. Not managed. Isaiah is describing the suffering servant, and the church has always read this of Jesus, and what it says He did with our griefs is that He picked them up. In the Hebrew the griefs are the sicknesses and the sorrows are the pains, the plain physical words, the ache in the chest at four in the afternoon. He carried that. You are met in the lull by One who has already carried the exact weight standing in your garage, and that is written in Isaiah, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes His carrying present rather than historical. I am not speaking my hope over you. I am reading you what He did.

And notice the order of it. He did not wait for the griefs to be handled and then carry what was left. He carried them raw. The whole point of Isaiah 53 is that the servant meets us in the thing, not after we have got it under control. That is the difference between met and managed. Management waits at the door until you have made yourself presentable. Meeting comes in and sits on the crate. You have a God who does not wait for you to handle it first, and the word says He is near to the broken-hearted, near, not near once you have stopped being broken, and His Spirit is the nearness.

Hebrews 4:15 puts it another way, and it is the verse for a man with a spanner in his hand and nothing to say. We do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses. Sympathize. The Greek word is to suffer alongside. He was tested in every way as we are. And the next verse says: so come with confidence to the throne of grace, and find mercy and grace to help in time of need. In time of need. Not after the need has been processed. You are welcome at the throne with the ache still on you and no cover over it, and He calls that confidence, not presumption; that is Hebrews 4, and the Spirit who wrote it is the one walking you up to the throne now.

I know two things try to stand between you and this. One says this was for prophets and priests and not for a man in a garage who has not counted the days because counting makes him tired. The other says it may be for people, but your thing underneath is too ordinary, or too ugly, or too long-standing to be carried like that. Hear me plainly. His word does not have an expiry date, and Jesus said the Spirit He sends stays with His people to the end, which is long enough to reach four o'clock this Saturday. And our griefs, in Isaiah, is not a select list. Ours. Yours is in there. Ordinary or ugly or old, He picked it up.

One more thing, and I say it because I would rather say it and not be needed. If the thing underneath is heavier than the day can hold, if it is saying anything to you about not being here, that is not a thing to sit alone with on a crate. Tell somebody tonight, a person you trust, or call or text 988 if you are in the United States, or your emergency number or a crisis line where you live. And anything happening in your body around the drink is a doctor's, not a page's. Say that to a doctor and let them carry it. That is not me managing you. That is me refusing to leave you in the garage on your own.