The Counter at the Truck Stop

Nine o'clock at night, ninety miles from anywhere, and the rain is coming across that lot sideways in a way that makes a man glad of a roof of any kind at all.

Wes eats in the cab. He has a routine and he is not ashamed of it. Cooler behind the seat, sandwich, apple, flask, the radio down low, and about eleven minutes of sitting in his own quiet before he moves the truck up to the end where he can sleep.

Two years now. It used to be the counter.

He was at that counter three, four nights a week for the better part of a decade. He knew every waitress on that stretch of road by name and most of their kids' names too. He knew who was going through a divorce and who had a boy in the service and which of the regulars would talk your ear off about a transmission.

Then he came through the worst two years of his life and out the other side of them into God, and it was real, and it holds, and he is not the same man. And somewhere in the first six months of that, without ever making a decision about it, he stopped going in.

He would tell you it is discipline. The counter is where the talk gets rough, and it does, and he was a man who joined in with all of it and was good at it and it fed something in him he does not want fed. So he stays in the cab. That is the reasoning and there is nothing stupid in it.

Tonight the window fogs and he wipes it with the back of his hand, and through the wet glass he can see the whole counter lit up like a fish tank.

Six of them on the stools. And the third one along, the young fella with the beard, has been crying at some point this evening and is now doing the thing men do, which is sitting up very straight and talking too loud about a route he did last week.

Wes knows that trick. Wes invented that trick.

He sits in the cab with a sandwich in his hand and understands, all at once and completely, that he has spent two years eating in a truck in order to stay out of the one room on this whole road where he might have done anybody any good.

You have sat in that cab. Yours has a different shape. But you know the reasoning, and you know it is not stupid, and you know it has not held up.

He answered the accusation with a doctor

This is the second chapter of Mark, and it is early, and He has just called a tax man out of a booth and gone straight to that tax man's house for dinner with all of the tax man's colleagues.

And when the scribes and Pharisees saw him eat with publicans and sinners, they said unto his disciples, How is it that he eateth and drinketh with publicans and sinners?Mark 2:16

Note who is asking, and note that they are not making it up. That is an accurate description of the evening. He is eating and drinking with them, in a house, at a table, in public, at a party thrown by a man who had just quit a despised job.

And His answer is not a defense of His personal purity. It is a picture.

They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick. I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.

You have been given a picture of yourself, and it is a doctor and not a man protecting his hands. That is the written word and not my thought about your routine, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an answer given at a tax collector's table and sets it down in a truck cab in the rain.

Turn that picture over, because it does something to the reasoning you have been running. A doctor in a room full of sick people is not compromising. A doctor is doing the only thing that makes the word doctor mean anything. A doctor who arranges his week so that he never has to be near illness has not become a better doctor. He has quietly stopped being one, and the strange part is that from the inside it feels responsible.

He went to the leaving party

I want you to see where He was sitting when they said it, because Mark does not hide it.

Levi has just walked away from a tax booth, which in that town is a career, a reputation and a whole social world. And what he does about it is throw a meal, and the people at that meal are the only people Levi knows, which is to say the exact crowd he has just left.

Jesus goes. He does not send a message of support. He does not wait for Levi to build a new set of friends and then meet him for coffee among the safe ones. He goes to the leaving party and sits down in it.

You are welcome in that room, and it is already settled that being in it is not the compromise. Mark 2 puts Him at the table with no apology attached, and the same Spirit who drove Him out to the wilderness and back is the one making it a present fact in a man wiping fog off his own windshield.

Now I will guard this, because I am not a fool and neither are you. There is such a thing as a room a person genuinely should not be in, and there are appetites that are better not fed, and Scripture says so plainly and I am not deleting a word of it. If a place takes you apart, the counsel is not to sit in it and pray harder, and I would say that to any man on this road.

But be honest about the size of what you did. You did not avoid one bar. You gave up the counter. All of it, the whole room, every conversation in it, including the waitress whose boy is overseas and the young fella on the third stool. That is not a fence around an appetite. That is a wall around a life, and the two do not cost the same.