Forty Minutes of the Ninety

The sign said road closed and there was nobody there to argue with.

That is the detail Dale keeps coming back to. Not the closure. The fact that there was not one human being anywhere near it. Two barriers, a sign on a stand, an arrow pointing at a county road he has driven maybe four times in his life, and no truck, no crew, no lights, nothing.

He got out. He genuinely got out of the truck and stood there in the road looking at it, because standing there was going to change it.

He had ninety minutes. It was going to be a forty minute drive.

I am not going to tell you what he was driving to, because it does not matter and because the moment I tell you, you will start deciding whether it was important enough to be upset about, and that is not a thing anybody else gets a vote in.

What matters is that he was going to miss it, and that the missing had nothing whatsoever to do with him.

So he got back in and took the county road, and for the first forty minutes he was as angry as he has been in about four years.

Out loud. On his own. He went through the county, and whoever puts a sign out with no crew behind it, and the fact that there had been no notice, and then, because this is how it goes, he moved backward through the day and found three other things, and then he moved backward through the month.

By minute forty he had got all the way to something from November.

And then, somewhere around the second bridge, he stopped.

He could not tell you why. He was not resolved and he had not decided anything and nothing about the situation had improved by one inch. He just ran out.

And he drove the last fifty minutes on a road he did not know, at fifty miles an hour, past a lot of standing water and one heron, and he did not have the radio on.

He said afterward, in a way that clearly bothered him: "That was the first quiet I have had since about the middle of July."

Now let me ask you what has been taken out of your hands this week.

Because something has. A cancellation, a closure, a decision made by somebody who never met you, a piece of weather. And I would guess you are still, in some part of your head, arguing with it.

The planning is yours. The steps are not.

There is a proverb about this that people quote at each other badly, and read properly it is the most practical sentence in this whole article.

The mind of man plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps.Proverbs 16:9

Notice that it does not tell you to stop planning.

That is the half everybody drops. It is not the mind of man plans his way, and he ought not to. Planning is stated as a plain fact about people, without one word of criticism attached, and Proverbs elsewhere is enthusiastic about it: it likes a man who counts the cost, it likes an ant with a summer store, it has no patience at all with a fool who does nothing and hopes.

Plan. Plan properly. Set out in good time. Dale left with ninety minutes for a forty minute drive, and that was not foolishness, that was a man doing it right.

But the Lord directs his steps. And that is a sentence about who has the last word on the route, not about whether you should have had a route.

So hear this said over you, standing in the road looking at a sign with nobody behind it. You are not the one directing your own steps and you never were, and the closure that took the thing off you was not a failure of your planning. That is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a proverb and turns it into something a man can drive fifty miles on, which is a different thing from agreeing that the proverb is true.

Now let me guard this hard, because this verse gets used to say something false and comfortable.

I am not going to tell you the road was closed for a reason.

Nothing here says God shut that road to teach Dale something, or to spare him from something, or to arrange the heron. That is a story people tell and it feels warm and it is not in Proverbs 16:9 and it is not here. The verse says God directs steps. It does not offer you the file.

And I am certainly not telling you that the thing you missed did not matter. It might have mattered a great deal. Nothing in this message is going to tidy that.

What the verse actually gives you is smaller and it is worth more.

You were not in charge of the route, so the route going wrong is not a report on you.

That is the piece that comes off. Because look at what Dale actually did for forty minutes: he went backward through the day, and then through the month, hunting for the place where he should have known. That is a man who believes, underneath everything, that if he had been sharper the road would have been open.

He would deny that if you said it to him. It is still what forty minutes of a ninety minute drive were spent on.

You are held by somebody who directs steps, and He has never once handed that job to you and then graded you on it. The written word says a man's steps are established by the Lord, and it is the Spirit of God who makes a person able to stop hunting for the mistake, and He does that at His own pace and never because somebody told them to.

And here is the last thing, and it is the reason this article is not about roads.

You will get the fifty minutes back.

Not the appointment. That is gone and this article is not promising you anything about it. The fifty minutes. The ones after you run out of arguing, which you will, because nobody sustains it: those are yours, and the only question is how many of the ninety you spend before you get there.

Dale spent forty. He would like to have spent ten.

There was a movement five hundred years ago built by people whose roads got closed constantly and by people rather than by weather. They did not comfort each other by explaining the closures. They held that steps are directed by God, said it plainly, and went the county road, and a good number of them said the quietest hours of their lives were on it.