The Truck Where You Still Eat Lunch

He eats his lunch in the cab.

Every day, in all weathers, parked in the gateway of whichever field he is working, with the door open in summer and the engine running for the heater in February. Sandwich on the dashboard. Flask wedged between the seat and the handbrake. Twenty minutes, and then back out.

The kitchen is four hundred yards away. The kettle is in it. So is the table, and six chairs, and a stove that has not been let go out in thirty years.

He does not eat in there. He has not eaten a midday meal in that kitchen since the will was read.

There are other things, and he would tell you every one of them has a perfectly good reason. He takes his boots off on the back step even when there is nobody in the house to mind. He hangs his coat on the nail beside the door rather than on the hooks in the hall, because the hooks in the hall have his father's coat on the end one and he has never taken it down.

He says "the place". Never "my place". At the market, when a man he half knows asks who has the far ground now, he hears himself say, "I look after it."

He has the paperwork. It is in the second drawer of the kitchen dresser, under the fuse wire and the good scissors, folded in three inside its envelope. His name is on it, typed, spelled right, in the place where a name goes.

He has read it twice. Once at the solicitor's and once at the kitchen table, standing up, with his coat still on.

That is the thing about the second drawer. A document does not have to be hidden to be avoided. It only has to be in a drawer you open for the scissors.

The neighbor's boy came for a fortnight in the summer to help with the bales, and on the second day he asked, quite innocently, why they did not just have their dinner in the house. And he heard himself give an answer about muddy boots and about time, and he heard how thin it was while it was still coming out of him.

Because you know it is not the boots.

You have worked this ground for four years now with a diligence nobody could fault. You have mended what needed mending and sold what needed selling and taken decisions your father would have taken differently, and you have taken them well.

And you have done all of it in the posture of somebody who is expecting the real owner back on Monday.

That is the whole shape of it. Not laziness, and not grief, though grief is in it somewhere. It is that receiving is a different act from working, and you were taught the second one from the age of six and never once taught the first.

So you sit in a gateway with a sandwich on the dashboard, on land with your name typed on it in the second drawer, eating like the hired man.

And the kettle is four hundred yards away, and it has been four hundred yards away for four years, and every day you drive past it.

No more a servant

Paul is writing to people who had gone back to keeping a set of rules in order to feel entitled to something they had already been given, which is a very close cousin of eating your lunch in a truck.

Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ.Galatians 4:7

Read the order of it. Son first, then heir. The inheritance is not a reward attached to good performance in the role of servant. It comes with the relationship, and the relationship came first, and the whole sentence turns on a change of standing rather than a change of conduct.

You are a son on this ground and not staff on it. Galatians 4:7 says thou art no more a servant but a son, and it says art, present tense, with nothing in the sentence held back for later; the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a legal fact off a page and settles it in a man sitting in a gateway with a flask between the seats.

Paul goes further in Romans, and he brings the Spirit right into the middle of it, which is exactly where this belongs.

He writes that we have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear, but the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. And then the line that does the work: the Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.

You have a witness inside you that is older than the paperwork in the drawer. Romans 8:16 says the Spirit beareth witness with our spirit that we are the children of God, so the confirmation you keep looking for in a solicitor's envelope has been going on in you the whole time; and it is the Holy Spirit doing the witnessing, not your own sense of whether you have earned the kitchen yet.

The elder brother ate in the yard

There is a son in one of the Lord's parables who did everything right for years and never once received anything, and almost nobody notices him because they are watching his brother.

He is out in the field when the music starts. He will not go in. And when his father comes out to him he says the sentence that this entire message exists for: these many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment, and thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends.

Look at the word serve. He is a son. He has been a son the entire time. And the language he reaches for to describe his own life on his own father's land is the language of service.

Then the father answers him, and it is one of the gentlest lines in Scripture.

Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.Luke 15:31

Ever with me. All that I have. Present tense, both halves.

Nothing had been withheld from that young man. There was no goat he had been refused, because there was no request he had ever made. He had spent years being a hired hand on ground that was already his, and the tragedy of it is that his father would have said yes on any afternoon of any of those years.

You have not been kept waiting for anything. Luke 15:31 has the father saying all that I have is thine to a son who had spent years assuming otherwise, and the assuming was the only thing standing in the way of the whole estate; the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that sentence out of a parable and puts it under a man's boots on his own land.

Now the guard on this, because it matters and it is easy to lose.

None of this is a promise about the ground itself. Fields flood. Prices move. Nothing here says anything at all about how the next four years go, and no message that respects you would pretend otherwise. What is being settled is standing, not outcome, and standing is the thing that has actually been wrong.

You were given the position before you did a single day's work on it, and no day's work since has improved it. His word says that if we are children then we are heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, and the whole clause hangs on being children rather than on being useful; the Spirit who calls a man to cry Abba is not standing over him with an assessment of how well the far ground was plowed.