The Bucket on the Drive at Eight

Every Sunday since about April, Ismael has washed the car at eight in the morning.

The blue bucket comes out of the same corner of the garage. He fills it at the outside tap, which drips down the wall unless you hold the bucket at an angle, so he holds it at an angle. Two sponges. One for the paintwork and one that lives in its own bag for the wheels, and he is entirely serious about those two never meeting.

He starts at the roof and works down, because that is how his father did it, and he does the wheel arches last.

Forty minutes, give or take. Then the bucket goes down the drain at the bottom of the drive, the sponges go on the shelf, and the car sits there wet and shining on a road where nobody is looking at it.

The car does not need washing.

It did not need washing last Sunday either. It does about ninety miles a week, mostly to a depot and back, and until the spring he did this once a fortnight and thought nothing of it. Now it is every Sunday without fail, and last Thursday he caught himself at the kitchen sink thinking forward to Sunday's wash, actually looking forward to it, and something in him went quiet in a way he did not like.

Here is why he does it, and he worked this out on his own, which is worse.

The wash has a beginning. It has a right way to do it and a wrong way. It takes forty minutes and then it is over, and when it is over you can stand back and see that it is over.

Nothing else in his week does that.

Because here is the situation, and it needs saying plainly. Ismael is not in trouble.

Nobody is ill. Nothing is going wrong at home. The two hard years finished in January when what needed covering stopped needing covering, and the second job went with it, and he is in his own house every evening now. He sleeps. He eats. He laughs at things on the telly with his youngest.

He is just not anywhere.

For two years he was a man with a position. He knew exactly what he was for at four in the morning in a cold yard, and there is a strange dignity in that which nobody warns you about, and he would not go back for anything, and he misses knowing where he stood.

At his cousin's christening in May somebody asked him what he was up to these days.

He said, not a lot.

It came out flatter than he meant it and he thought about it the whole way home in the car, because it was true, and because he could not think of one word to put in its place. He is not up to anything. He is not stuck, because stuck means something is holding him and nothing is. He is not lost, because lost means there was a somewhere he was supposed to be.

Every couple of weeks the thought arrives. I should do something. Make a plan. Get a course, get a trade, get a five year whatever it is that other people seem to have.

Then he does not, and by Tuesday it has gone, and the having of the thought is somehow worse than the not acting on it.

Here is where I stop talking about Ismael, because you already know whether that is your Sunday morning.

Maybe there is no bucket. Maybe it is that you have not said yes to anything or no to anything since the spring. Maybe you have three routes and you could not tell anybody why they are the three. Maybe when somebody asks what is next you hear yourself say we will see, and it comes out sounding like a man with something in mind, and there is nothing in mind at all.

Nothing is wrong. That is not the same as being somewhere.

Being set down is not the same as being sent somewhere

I want to give you one verse, and the gift in it is partly what it does not contain.

I waited, yes I waited, for the Lord, and He bent down to me and heard my cry. He drew me up out of the muddy pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps firm.Psalm 40:1-2

The verb is past. He set. Not He is deciding, not He is drawing something up, not He is about to see how this goes. Psalm 40:2 puts the whole action behind the man rather than out in front of him, and the Holy Spirit does not let that tense slip while you read it. You are standing on something that was settled before you filled the bucket.

Now look at the two surfaces David gives you, because only one of them is the problem and it is not the one you would guess. Clay is not the enemy because clay is unpleasant. Clay is the enemy because nothing holds in it. And a rock is not the answer because a rock takes you anywhere, since a rock is famously the one thing that does not, but because a rock holds, and the Spirit chose that pair on purpose for a man who has decided his problem is that he is not moving.

Sit with that, because it is close to the opposite of what almost anybody would tell you on a driveway.

You have been asking where. Where next, where is this going, where should a man my age be by now. The Spirit keeps answering with a preposition instead of a destination: upon a rock, Psalm 40:2, feet on it, and He has not shifted off that answer once since April.

If I said this to you over a gate it would be one man's opinion and worth about what you paid for it. It is not mine. It is sitting in the psalm, and the Holy Spirit is the one saying it over a Sunday morning in which nothing whatsoever is scheduled to happen.

And the psalm has company. Paul writes that God arranged the parts of the body, each one of them, just as He chose, 1 Corinthians 12:18, and the word doing the work there is arranged. Not drifted, not defaulted, not left over. The Spirit lays that beside Psalm 40 like two hands on the same shoulders: you have been arranged into your place by somebody who chose it deliberately.

Now I am going to leave something alone, on purpose.

I am not going to tell you what the two hard years were for. Nobody here is pulling a lesson out of your nights, or telling you they built something in you, or explaining a cold yard as preparation for something that has not turned up. Psalm 40 does not do that with the pit either. It says He drew the man up out of it, and it never once says why he was down there, and I am going to stop exactly where David stops.

And nothing in this asks you for a plan.

Not by tonight, not by the autumn, not at all. The last line of Psalm 40:2 says He makes the steps firm, and read it slowly: the establishing is His work in that sentence and it is already behind the man, and the Holy Spirit is not standing at the end of your drive waiting for you to produce a direction before He calls you placed. You are planted whether or not you can name a next thing.