The Man at the Feed Store

He has driven forty one miles to Cortland for feed eleven weeks running, and there is a store four miles from his gate.

His younger boy died in June. Twenty three. A rollover on the county road at about four in the morning, alone, and there is no part of any of that he has been able to put down.

He has one older son. That matters for what comes next.

The week after the funeral he went into the store for mineral, and the fellow at the register, who has run that counter for twenty two years and who came to the service and stood at the back with his hat in his hands, rang it up and said, without looking up: at least you still have the other one.

That is what was said. Six words of it, seven if you count the pause.

He paid. He carried the mineral out. He sat in the truck in that lot for about ten minutes and then he drove home, and he has not been back in there since, and now he drives to Cortland, and his wife has asked twice why and he has said the price is better.

Here is what he cannot get out of his head, and it has taken him all summer to get it into words even privately. That sentence turned his two sons into a quantity. As though there were a certain amount of son in the family and some of it was gone and the rest was still on hand. As though the older one were a remainder.

And the man at the register would rather cut his own hand off than have said that.

He knows that. That is the part that makes this impossible to talk about. If he ever said anything, that fellow would be undone, and he would tell people, and it would get around, and a decent man would carry it for years.

So he drives to Cortland.

If that is a truck anybody has sat in, in a parking lot, for ten minutes, stay right here. Proverbs has a verse for exactly this and it is more precise than anything anybody has said to him all summer.

The word Proverbs uses is the piercing of a sword

Here it is, and I want you to notice that it does not describe an enemy anywhere in it.

There is that speaketh like the piercings of a sword: but the tongue of the wise is health.Proverbs 12:18

There is that speaketh. Not there is a wicked man. Not there is an enemy of God. There is that speaketh, which is about as neutral a description of a person as the Hebrew can manage, and then it says what the words did.

Piercings of a sword. That is the language Scripture reaches for, and it is not exaggerating for effect. It is the accurate word for what six words at a register can do to a man in the fourth week.

You are not thin skinned, and you were never soft for taking a wound off a sentence. Proverbs 12:18 is the written word calling a careless word a sword thrust without one syllable about the speaker's character, and the Holy Spirit is the one who saw to it that the wound got named without a man being convicted for it.

That is the whole architecture of the verse and it is worth having. It separates the effect from the intent completely. It never asks the wounded man to establish whether it was meant. It just says: that is what those words do, and that is what they did.

You have been carrying a real injury rather than a grudge, and you were never obliged to decide he is a bad man in order to admit it hurt. Proverbs 12:18 makes no ruling on the speaker at all, and the Spirit of God is not asking a rancher to build a case against a man who came to the service.

Two sons is not a quantity

Now the actual thing, because the sentence is not the injury. What the sentence implied is the injury.

At least you still have the other one is arithmetic. It treats children as a count.

And here is what everybody knows and nobody has said to you all summer: there is no arithmetic. You did not have two sons the way a man has two trucks. You had a son named one thing and a son named another thing, and they were not interchangeable and neither of them was ever a spare.

Scripture agrees with you, and it agrees with you in the most direct way available. A man in Luke leaves ninety nine sheep in the wilderness and goes after one. Nobody in that story says he still has ninety nine. That is the whole point of the parable, and Jesus told it to explain how God Himself counts.

God does not run the arithmetic your register did.

And there is one more thing about the older boy, and I want it said plainly. That sentence did something to him too, whether he heard it or not, because a man who has been described as a remainder generally knows it. He is not a consolation. He is your son.

You are the father of two named people and you were never handed a quantity, and you were never given a spare. Luke 15:4 has a man leaving ninety nine to go after one and God calling that the correct arithmetic, and the Holy Spirit is not standing at any counter counting your children.

What to do about the fellow at the register

Here is the practical part and I am going to be plain about it, because a man in a truck needs something he can actually do on Tuesday.

There are three options on the table and only two of them are real.

The first is Cortland. That costs eighty two miles a week and a store a man has used for thirty years, and it goes on costing, and it does not put the sentence down. Everything about driving to Cortland keeps it alive.

The second is to say something to him. Some men can and it goes fine. But a county this size makes that a bigger thing than it looks, and a man who has already decided that for a decent reason does not need me arguing with him about it.

The third is the one nobody offers, and it is the one this article is for. Take the sentence off the man. Put the words on the ground and leave the fellow at the register standing there whole.

That is not pretending it did not happen. That is refusing to let six words become a verdict on a man who stood at the back of a funeral with his hat in his hands.

Right now, as you read this, you are free to walk back into that store carrying nothing, and you were never required to settle it with him first. Proverbs 12:18 names the wound and passes no sentence on the speaker, and His Spirit has been in that parking lot every one of the eleven weeks.