The Truck I Sold in 2009

It was a green three quarter ton with a bad passenger door and a heater that only worked at full.

He was thirty four. He was on County Road 9 about four miles out, hauling nothing, coming back from a place he had not needed to go to, and it was late March and there was still snow in the shade on the north side of the ditches.

He is not a man who tells this story. He has told it twice in sixteen years. What he says, when he says it, is that the Spirit of God came on him in that truck on that road and he had to pull over and he sat there for a good while.

He sold the truck in the fall of 2009. It had a hundred and ninety on it and the frame was going and it was the right decision.

And here is the thing he would deny if you put it to him directly, which is why nobody has.

Some part of him has attached the whole event to that vehicle. Not superstitiously. He would tell you that is nonsense and he would mean it. But he has never once, in sixteen years, asked God to do that again, and when he thinks about it happening again the picture that comes is always a truck and always that road and always late March, and since none of those three things is available to him, neither, apparently, is the other thing.

He is fifty now and the years have been mostly good and something in him has been running low for a while.

The sentence, if he ever said it out loud, would sound foolish and he knows it. That is exactly why he has not said it. It happened in the truck.

You may have your own truck. The place, the year, the set of conditions you cannot get back to.

The Spirit does not attach to a location

Take Gideon, because Gideon is the plainest case in the book and the details are all wrong for a spiritual event.

He is threshing wheat in a winepress, which is a ridiculous place to thresh wheat and he is doing it because he is hiding. He is the youngest in the least important family in his tribe and he says so, twice, and he is not being modest.

And then this.

But the Spirit of the Lord came upon Gideon, and he blew a trumpet.Judges 6:34

The Hebrew underneath that is stronger than the English. It says the Spirit clothed Himself with Gideon, put him on the way a man puts on a coat. And it happens in a valley, in a farm town, to a frightened man who has already asked for two signs and will ask for another one after this.

No location is named as necessary. No conditions are listed. Nothing about the wheat or the winepress or the time of day is recorded as a requirement, and when the Spirit comes on Gideon again later in his life it is not in the winepress.

You are not dealing with something that attaches to a place, and Judges 6:34 has the Spirit of God arriving on an ordinary man in an ordinary yard with no conditions recorded anywhere, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who takes an account from a farming valley and lands it on a man who has been picturing a green truck for sixteen years.

What he has actually been doing

Look at what the mind does with a strong memory, because this is common and nobody warns anybody about it.

Something real happens in a particular set of circumstances. The mind, which is built to find patterns, files the circumstances along with the event, because at the time it had no way to tell which part was doing the work. And after that, the whole package comes back together or not at all.

That is not superstition and it is not a failure of faith. It is how memory is made. But it means a man can end up waiting sixteen years for a vehicle.

You have been waiting on conditions God never set, because the written word records the Spirit coming on Gideon without one word about where or when or under what arrangements, and His Spirit is what turns that from a fact about Judges into a thing that frees a man up on a Tuesday.

And notice what happens right after the Spirit comes on him. He blows a trumpet, and men gather. The filling has an errand attached to it, immediately, and the errand is about other people. It is not staged for Gideon and it does not require an audience or a mood.

You are being met by a God who arrives where a man happens to be working, and Judges 6 puts the whole event in a farm yard in the middle of a job, and the same Spirit who clothed Himself with a frightened farmer does not need a road in late March.

Asking again is not asking for a repeat

Now the part he would push back on, which is that he does not want to manufacture anything or chase an experience, and he is right about that.

Nobody is asking him to reconstruct County Road 9. That is the opposite of the point. Reconstructing it is what he has quietly been unable to do, and the freedom here is that reconstruction was never on the table and was never required.

What is on the table is a second asking, made in a yard, in whatever the weather is, in a vehicle he currently owns or none at all. The filling is not a reenactment. It does not have to look like March.

You were never asked to reproduce anything, because Judges 6:34 has no conditions in it to reproduce, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a relief for a man who thought the door had shut when the truck sold.