The Steady One on the Crew

When something goes badly wrong, they call him. Not the foreman. Him.

That has been true for about nine years and nobody ever announced it. It just settled that way, the way these things do. When the trench came in on the east side and a man was in it, three separate people phoned him and one of them was the foreman. When the young guy went to pieces in the parking area after his first bad day, somebody walked him over to the truck and knocked on the window.

He is good at it. He does not know why exactly. Something in him slows down when everything else speeds up, and he has stopped trying to explain that and simply uses it.

And he has wanted to be filled with the Holy Spirit since he was about twenty six.

He has never asked. Twelve years.

If you got him talking, late, at the end of a long day, he might get as far as saying he does not know what it would do to him. And if you pushed, and he trusted you, he might get to the actual sentence, which is not about him at all.

It is about the phone.

He has a picture in his head of a Tuesday afternoon where somebody calls and he is not the man who slows down. He does not know why that picture is in there. He cannot point to a verse that put it there or a person who told him. But it is there, and every single time he gets near asking for this, it arrives, and it wins.

The sentence, if he ever said it: what if it takes the thing they call me for.

You may know that picture. The one useful thing about you, and the fear that this would cost it.

The keeping is not his job

There is a line at the end of a short letter from an old man in prison to a younger one, and it settles the question of who is responsible for holding on to what God gives.

That good thing which was committed unto thee keep by the Holy Ghost which dwelleth in us.2 Timothy 1:14

Read the mechanism. Something good has been put into a man. He is told to keep it. And then, immediately, the means is named, and the means is not the man's own grip. It is the Holy Spirit who lives in him.

That is a strange and generous sentence. Paul does not tell Timothy to hold tighter. He tells him that the holding itself is done by the one who was given, which means the whole arrangement is self keeping in a way nothing else in a person's life is.

You are not the one responsible for holding this steady, and 2 Timothy 1:14 assigns the keeping to the Holy Spirit who dwells in a person rather than to the person's own grip, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line written from a cell and lands it on a man in a truck with a phone on the seat beside him.

Dwelling is a settled word

Consider the verb Paul uses for the Spirit's presence, because it is a domestic one.

Dwell is not visit. It is not pass through or come upon for an afternoon. It is the word for living somewhere, for a household arrangement, for the place a person comes back to at the end of the day.

A man whose defining quality is steadiness ought to notice that. The word chosen for how the Spirit is present is the most settled word available, and it sits in the same sentence as the keeping.

You are dealing with something described in the most settled language in the letter, because the written word says the Spirit dwells rather than visits and puts the keeping in His hands, and His Spirit is what turns that from a point of vocabulary into a thing a man can rely on.

And look at what Paul is actually worried about in that chapter, which is not disorder. It is a young man losing his nerve. The whole letter is about courage and about not being ashamed, and this verse is the answer to that, not a warning about anything getting out of hand.

You are being handed nerve and not a risk to it, and 2 Timothy 1 aims the whole passage at a man in danger of going quiet rather than at a man in danger of going loud, and the same Spirit who dwells in a person is the one who fills.

The steadiness was never his in the first place

Now the deeper thing, which he has never examined because it does not present itself as a question.

He thinks of the slowing down as his. A quality he has. A piece of equipment he owns and could conceivably lose in a transaction.

But he could not tell you where it came from and he has said so. Something in him slows down and he stopped trying to explain it years ago. That is the description of a gift, not of a skill, and a man cannot lose in a transaction with God a thing that God put in him in the first place.

You were given that steadiness and it did not originate with you, because 2 Timothy 1:14 calls what is in a person a good thing committed to them rather than something they generated, and it is His Spirit who makes that a relief rather than a rearrangement of what he thought he owned.