The Sleeve I Kept Rolled Down

Sonny Reyes was twenty two when he had it put on the inside of his left forearm. A book, a chapter, a colon, a number. Nothing else. No picture, no banner, no design around it.

He got it six weeks after the worst year of his life ended, and he got it for one reason he has never said out loud to another human being: he wanted something on him that could not be taken back. Everything he had said out loud that year had been taken back. Promises to his mother. Promises to himself. He wanted one thing on his body that would still be there on a morning when he did not mean it.

He is thirty seven now. He runs the parts counter at a marine supply on the harbor road, and in fifteen years not one person has ever asked him about it.

That is because nobody has ever seen it. Long sleeves, every day, all year. He tells the guys it is the fiberglass, and the fiberglass is a real thing, and it is also not the reason.

Here is the reason, and he could not have told you this either. If somebody asked, then saying it would be answering. Answering is easy. Answering is polite. It is the other person who opened the door and all you did was walk through it, and nobody can say you were pushing anything on anybody.

So he waited. Fifteen years of waiting to be asked. Fifteen years of a sentence sitting in his mouth like a stone in a shoe, and a whole rehearsed answer built up behind it, four clauses long, worded so carefully that nobody could argue with it. He had polished that answer the way some men polish a truck they never drive.

Then a Saturday in July, hauling a friend's boat out for a bottom job. Half the guys from the harbor came down, and somebody's kids came, and by ten in the morning there were three hoses going and it had stopped being work. Somebody put a thumb over a nozzle. Somebody else got it in the ear. Sonny took a wall of water across the back of the neck and came up hollering, and he was soaked to the skin, and he had his sleeves shoved up past his elbows before he ever thought about it.

The boy on the trailer frame was sixteen. He had the scrub brush. He looked down at Sonny's forearm and he said, without any weight on it at all:

"Uncle. What's that mean?"

And the four-clause answer was not there.

Sonny looked at his own arm like he had never seen it. What came out was nine words. It was not eloquent. It did not have the careful part in the middle where nobody could argue.

The kid said, "Huh. Okay." And then, "Hold the hose, I can't reach."

That was it. That was the whole thing. The sky stayed where it was. Nobody argued, nobody cried, nobody got saved on a boat trailer. Sonny held the hose and the boy scrubbed the waterline and the two of them worked their way down the hull toward the stern.

But Sonny stood there in the sun with fresh water running off the end of his nose and something in his chest had come loose that had been tight since he was twenty two.

He had spent fifteen years guarding a door that nobody had ever been trying to come through.

He sent him back to his own house

There is a man in Luke's gospel who had lived in the tombs, and Jesus met him there, and by the middle of the story he is sitting down, clothed, in his right mind. Then he asks Jesus for one thing.

He asks to come along.

Return to thine own house, and shew how great things God hath done unto thee. And he went his way, and published throughout the whole city how great things Jesus had done unto him.Luke 8:39

Sit with how strange that is. The man asks for the good option. Go with the teacher. Get on the boat. Go somewhere your history is not standing on every corner. And Jesus says no, and sends him back up the road to the exact town that had been chaining him and losing him and talking about him for years.

Nothing in the text scolds him for asking. Jesus simply gives him a harder and better commission, and it is four words long at its center. Shew how great things God hath done unto thee.

Not argue. Not explain. Not defend. Show.

Hear this over you, because it takes a weight off your arm: you have never once been assigned to win anybody. The word says shew, and shewing is the whole of what you owe. That is not my softening of the job. It is the sentence Jesus actually handed a man in that condition, and the Holy Spirit who carried him up that road is the same Spirit standing next to you at the parts counter.

And notice the second half. He went his way and published it throughout the whole city.

Nobody asked him.

There is no question in that story. There is no polite opening, no neighbor leaning over a fence saying so tell me what happened to you. The town had watched him at his absolute worst and the town was, if anything, afraid of him. He walked back in and started saying it, and the saying of it was the whole obedience.

So the wait is over, and it is over because it was never a wait God put you in. You are not out of order for speaking first. The written word never once tells a rescued person to stand by until questioned. It tells him to shew, and the Spirit who prompted that man to open his mouth on his own street has been the One stirring the sentence in your chest all these years.

Now let me say the tender thing, because a person can hear all of that as an accusation and I will not have it land that way.

Those quiet years were not cowardice.

You wanted to be asked because being asked would have meant you were wanted. That is a person who got hurt somewhere by saying a true thing at the wrong moment, and who worked out, correctly, that an answer costs less than an announcement. You were protecting something real.

And you are not behind. There is no lateness in this. What He did for you is not less true for having gone fifteen years without being spoken. His word says the gifts and calling of God are without repentance, which means He does not take it back and He has not been sitting up there tapping His watch. The Spirit who kept that sentence alive in you through fifteen silent years was keeping it, not scoring it.

And now let me stop saying he, because the man standing in the sun with the water running off him is you.

You know exactly where the ink is. You know which shirts you do not wear. You know the four-clause answer, and you know it has never once been said to a living soul, and you know that somewhere in about the eighth year you started to suspect the answer had gotten too good to say.

That sentence is yours to say and your own body is allowed to say it. God gave you a mouth and a street and a name people know, and Scripture puts the shewing in the hands of the one it happened to. Not the eloquent one, not the trained one. The one it happened to. And the Holy Spirit is not waiting for you to be more ready. He is waiting to be leaned on.