Four Hundred Miles and the Radio

Hour six. Four hundred miles door to door and he is somewhere past the middle of it and there are about four hours left.

He has worked through the whole supply.

Two hours of a podcast about something he does not especially care about. An hour of a radio station that turned out to be mostly commercials. Every album he has downloaded, and he has downloaded a lot, and he cycled through the first ninety seconds of about eleven of them before giving up on each one. A call to his brother that lasted eleven minutes and was fine. A call to a friend that went to voicemail and he did not leave a message.

And then, somewhere around a place with a water tower, he turned all of it off.

Not for any reason. He reached over and killed it and did not turn anything else on, and that was forty minutes ago, and he has been driving in silence since with nothing but road noise, which is not silence but is the closest thing available at seventy miles an hour.

And here is what has been sitting in the cab for forty minutes.

He always does this. Every long drive of his life. He loads up before he goes. He treats a four-hundred-mile drive as a problem to be covered, and he covers it, and he has never once thought of it as anything other than sensible.

And it is sensible. Nobody drives four hundred miles in silence on purpose.

But it is not just the drives. He put something on this morning while he was getting ready. He has something on while he works. There is a thing on in the kitchen at home most evenings that nobody is watching. And a man who has never had an hour without sound in it for about fifteen years is not simply a man who likes music.

He turned it off forty minutes ago and he does not entirely know why, and now there is something in the cab with him that he has no name for and has apparently been outrunning at some considerable expense in bandwidth.

And you know that road. There is a hunger in you and you have been covering it with sound for a long time, and you have never called it covering, and then this afternoon you turned it all off and there it was.

So take this in before we go a step further. You are not weak for the noise and there is nothing wrong with you for what is in the cab. Psalm 139:7 asks whither shall I go from thy spirit, or whither shall I flee from thy presence, and the whole psalm answers that there is nowhere, and the Holy Spirit is in this truck with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

The animal is not sad

There is an image at the top of the forty-second psalm that everybody has heard set to music, and the music has generally made it gentler than it is.

As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.Psalm 42:1

The animal in that verse is not wistful. It is not standing by a stream looking thoughtful.

Panteth is a hard word. It is the sound an animal makes when it is in trouble. This is a deer that has been running, or is in drought, and it is at the end of something, and the panting is the audible evidence of a body that needs water now rather than a creature having a reflective moment by a brook.

And the psalmist takes that, deliberately, as the accurate picture of his own soul.

That matters enormously for a man who has spent fifteen years assuming that whatever is in him is a mood, a softness, something to be managed and covered rather than something with the standing of a physical need. The psalm does not treat it as a mood. It reaches for the most bodily, least dignified image available: an animal at the end of its endurance, audibly needing water.

You are carrying something with the standing of thirst rather than the standing of a mood. The written word picks a distressed animal rather than a wistful one, which means what is in your cab is a requirement and not an indulgence; and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into hour six with everything switched off.

And notice what the psalmist does with it. He does not fix it and he does not apologize for it. He says it, out loud, in the first line, to God, before anything else in the psalm happens.

Covering is not cowardice

I want to be fair to the fifteen years, because you are about to start reading them as avoidance and that is both too simple and unkind.

You did not fill your hours with sound because you were running from your soul. You filled them because sound is available, and because a long drive is genuinely long, and because a kitchen with something on in it is warmer than a kitchen without, and because nobody in the last twenty years has had to sit in a quiet hour unless they arranged one.

That is not a character flaw. It is the water everybody is swimming in, and it has never once been presented to you as a decision.

The cost is not that you did something wrong. The cost is that a thing which needed to be named has had nowhere to surface for a very long time, and it has been surfacing anyway, in the gaps, which is why you reached over and killed the radio near a water tower for no reason you could give.

You were not avoiding anything, and nobody handed you the quiet hour as a choice. Psalm 62:1 says truly my soul waiteth upon God, and the word for waiteth carries the sense of being silent before Him; His Spirit is the one who brings a person to that, and He is not auditing your playlists.

And here is the second half, and I want to be careful with it. I am not going to tell you what this hunger is about, or read your fifteen years of noise as evidence about your childhood or your marriage or anything else. A stranger writing at a distance who starts explaining a man to himself off four paragraphs is doing something he has no business doing.

What is true is that it is real, that it has the standing of a physical need, and that it does not have to be understood before it can be met.

You are not being asked for an explanation, and none is required before the water. Isaiah 44:3 says I will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and floods upon the dry ground, and the only qualification in the sentence is thirst; the same Spirit who had that written is the one who has ridden every long drive you have ever taken.

Four hours is the room

Here is the practical thing, and it is unusually convenient.

You have four hours left, alone, in a cab, with nobody in the world able to reach you and nothing required of you but staying on the road. Most people go years without four hours like that, and you get them regularly and have been covering every single one of them.

You do not need to fill it and you do not need to endure it either. You need to say one sentence into it.

Out loud, in a moving vehicle, at a normal volume, with nobody within a hundred feet. There is no better room on earth for this and you have been sitting in it for fifteen years with the radio on.

You are already in the best available room, and there are four hours of it left. Scripture says so panteth my soul after thee, O God, and the psalmist puts it in the first line rather than working up to it; the Holy Spirit is the one who had you reach over and kill the radio near a water tower.

So the road is not something to be covered. It is four hours of the emptiest room a man is ever given, and a hunger with the standing of thirst, and a cab with two in it.

And if what is under this is heavier than a page can carry, do not sit with it alone. Find a real person this week, one who can be with you without needing to explain you to yourself. If it has gone somewhere darker than tired, do not wait: in the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour and a person will answer.