I Cry in the Truck

Same words at the top of every page here, and they matter more than anything I write after them. This is not medicine. I am not a doctor or a nurse, nothing on this page is treatment, and nothing here ever stands in for a clinic or a pharmacist. If the one you are caring for has you worried, ring somebody qualified today. That is not weakness. That is the job.

Now. I know where you go.

There is a specific place. For a lot of men it is a vehicle, and for a lot of those it is a vehicle that is not moving. The driveway. The far end of the parking lot at work. Pulled over on a road with the engine off, for eight or nine minutes, and then the face gets put back on and the truck goes home.

Nobody has ever seen it. That is the whole point of it. And in your own accounting, the man in that truck is the weak one and the man who walks back into the house is the real one, and you have been running that arrangement for months without ever saying a word about it.

I want to talk about that arrangement, because I think you have got the two men the wrong way round.

The shortest verse in the book is about a man who did this in public

There is a verse everybody knows because of its length, and hardly anybody looks at what it is doing.

Jesus wept. (John 11:35, King James Version)

Two words, and every single thing about that moment is worth noticing.

He is not alone. He is in front of a crowd. He knows exactly what He is about to do at that tomb, which means the weeping is not despair and it is not a failure of faith, and it is not because He had run out of options.

He weeps because the people He loves are in pieces and He is standing in it with them.

You are doing something the Lord Himself did in public, and it has never once been the weak half of anybody. John 11:35 records the weeping without one word of apology or explanation, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man stop despising his own eight minutes in a truck.

And nobody in the account treats it as a lapse. The crowd's response is to say, behold how he loved him. They read the tears as evidence of love rather than of collapse, which is exactly the opposite of how you have been reading yours.

You have been reading your own evidence backwards, and the tears have never once been a report on your strength. The Spirit of God is the one who corrects a man's own translation of himself, and it is written that the shortest verse in the book carries a weeping that nobody hid.

Why the truck, and what the truck is costing

Let me be practical, because that is what a man reading this wants.

The truck works. I am not going to pretend it does not. It is private, it has a door, it has a time limit, and it puts the coming apart somewhere it cannot frighten anybody. As arrangements go it is a decent one and I have used it myself.

Here is the cost, and it is not the crying. It is that the people in that house now have a man who appears to be fine, permanently, and they are matching themselves to him. Your wife is holding herself together against a standard you set in a vehicle she has never been in.

You are setting a standard nobody can reach, and no household has ever once been steadied by a man who never showed anything. John 11:35 has grief expressed in front of the people who were grieving, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a man what his own composure is doing to his kitchen.

And there is a second cost, which is simpler. Eight minutes in a truck is not enough, and it was never designed to be. It is a release valve, and a release valve is not a conversation.

You were built for something more than a valve, and no man has ever once been sustained by eight minutes alone. The Spirit of God is the one who gets a man to say out loud where he goes, and what is written puts the weeping in company rather than in private.

The plain routing, and one line of it is yours

Here is the part of this page that is not comfort, and on an article for a carer it goes both ways.

If something is happening right now with the person you are looking after, that is 911, and it comes before everything else here. If the heavy thing out in that truck is more than eight minutes, if it is most of the day, or if it has started to include thoughts about not being here, then 988 answers, and a real person picks up, and that is exactly what it is for. And anything in that house that has not been looked at goes to a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist today.

You are inside every line of that routing, and the well one in a house has never once been outside it. John 11:35 has the strongest person in the account weeping in front of everybody, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man count himself among the people who need somebody.

I want to be plain about that middle one, because men skip it. If what happens in that truck has got darker than grief, tell somebody today. Not eventually. Today.

You have a number and a person and a door, and none of them has ever once been for somebody else only. The Spirit of God is the one who is present with a man making a call about himself, and what is written puts the tears of the strongest into the record in public.