He Prayed With The Windows Up

For twenty two years the only room in his life with a door on it was a truck cab.

He settled it on a bunk at a hunting camp when he was nineteen, alone, in the dark with the stove ticking. Then he got up in the morning and did not tell a living soul, and that turned out to be a habit rather than a decision.

He prayed on the way to the feed mill after that. Out loud, every morning, twenty past five, because the cab was the one place on earth where a man could say a thing and have nobody hear it. Windows up. Radio off between the mill road and the bridge. Twenty two years of it, and not one person on that road knew.

Then one March the creek came up over the low crossing on Caney Fork Road.

It goes under about twice a year and everybody local knows it. A boy in a small car did not, and the engine quit halfway across, and by the time the second truck stopped the water was up his door.

Men got out. Somebody backed a truck down the bank and somebody else went for a strap.

And an old fellow on the gravel beside him, a man he had known his whole life and never discussed anything with, said, mostly to the road: "Somebody ought to be praying."

And he heard his own voice say, "I already am."

Four words. Out loud. In front of six people and a creek.

Nobody turned around. The strap came, the boy came out through the window, and every man there went home and told his wife about the car.

He drove on to the mill with his hands shaking on the wheel. Twenty two years, and he had never said it where a person could hear him, and it took a road going under to get the window down.

You know that cab.

Maybe it is not a truck. Maybe it is the kitchen at half past five, or the ten minutes in the parking lot before you go in. Somewhere in your life is a room with a door on it, and inside that room you are a believer, and outside it you are whatever the room requires. And you have never told anybody, and you have been quietly wondering what that says about you.

Nobody in that chapter asks him what took so long

There is a man in Acts who carried it further than most.

He was a court official from Ethiopia, the treasurer, and he had gone up to Jerusalem to worship. That is well over a thousand miles of road, one way. On the ride home he is sitting in a moving chariot reading Isaiah out loud to himself.

Read that slowly, because it is the loneliest detail in the chapter. He is reading it aloud with nobody to read it with.

Then Philip comes alongside, and here is what the man says next.

And as they went on their way, they came unto a certain water: and the eunuch said, See, here is water; what doth hinder me to be baptized?Acts 8:36

Now notice what is not in that account.

Philip never asks him how long he has been carrying this on his own, or why it took two thousand miles of road and a stranger in the dust before it came out of him. There is no audit in the chapter, and no ledger with the quiet years written down one under the other.

You are a believer whose belief has been heard every single morning, and not one of those mornings is held against you. 1 Samuel 16:7 says the Lord looketh on the heart, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been in that room every day, standing there as a witness and never once as an auditor.

And look at what the man does ask.

Not whether he is ready. Not how long a person is supposed to wait, or what the household back home will make of it. He looks out of the side of a chariot at a bit of roadside water and says: here is water, what hinders me. That is a man who has stopped auditing himself and started looking around.

You have a mouth that was built for the second half of this, and it is already in working order. Romans 10:8 says the word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth, and in thy heart, and the same Spirit of God who put it in the one is well able to move it to the other.

Romans 10:10 puts it plainer still: with the heart man believeth, and with the mouth confession is made. Two organs, and God named both. The heart part you have been doing for years, in the dark, with nobody clapping. The mouth part is not a higher grade of Christian. It is the second half of what you have already been doing.

The water was already beside the road

Let me take three things off the table, because a reader is owed a plain account of what this message will not do.

I am not handing you a date. There is no ceremony in here, no process, no form, nobody to go and see about it. Whatever has or has not already happened to you in a church, in water or out of it, I am not weighing it and neither is this. And I am not letting anybody, including you, call those quiet years nothing.

You have been believing the whole time, and the years with the windows up were real years. Psalm 139:4 says there is not a word in your tongue but He knows it altogether, and the Holy Spirit heard every one of them at twenty past five with the radio off. The record of your faith runs a great deal longer than the public part of it.

Here is the thing about the water in that account. It was not a test set out in front of the man. It was just there, at the side of a road he was already traveling, and it is a picture and not a verdict.

Something in him had gone from private to visible, and he used what was there, in his own body, in front of the only person present. Your version might be one sentence at a kitchen table, or four words on a creek bank with your hands shaking on the wheel afterward.

You are allowed to be seen, and it is already settled that you are. Matthew 5:16 says let your light so shine before men, a permission handed down and not a demand laid on, and it is the Spirit of Christ in you who does the shining, so the weight of it never rested on your nerve.

Hear the other half, because it matters more than the first. The quiet years are the ache being answered here, not a fault being named. Nobody is grading the distance between nineteen and forty one, and the man who traveled a thousand miles to worship in private and went home still private was not behind schedule. Neither are you.