Forty Years of Watching Others Get Theirs

Burl Hensley has the key to Cane Creek on a ring with his truck key, and he has had it since he was thirty-one.

He unlocks at six on a Wednesday, turns the lights on in the hall, puts the coffee on, and sits in the same folding chair against the back wall so he can get up and see to the thermostat without walking in front of anybody. Then, at the end, he locks up. Forty years of it. He is the last one in the parking lot roughly two thousand times.

Wednesday at Cane Creek is testimony night. Always has been. Somebody stands up and tells what God did that week and everybody says amen, and then somebody else stands up. Burl can tell you every one of them. He can tell you about Ferrell Sizemore's back, and the time the Whitt girl's paperwork went through after they had been told twice it would not, and Nell Combs standing up the week after her diagnosis and singing instead of talking because she said she could not get the words out any other way. He has heard forty years of it. He has sat through every one, and said amen to every one, and meant it every time, and he has never once had one of his own.

That is the plain fact and he does not dress it up. Nothing has ever happened to Burl. He has never been healed of anything, because he has not been sick with anything worth mentioning. Nothing has ever come in the mail. He has never had the kind of night people stand up and describe. He got saved at nineteen at a brush arbor meeting and he did not fall down or shake or weep, he just walked up and told the man he believed it, and he has believed it every day since without a single interruption, and there is nothing in that anybody would call a story.

So he says amen for other people. He is good at it. He has been genuinely glad for every one of them, which is more than a lot of men could manage over forty years.

But driving home, in the dark, on that four miles of road, there is a sentence that comes and sits in the truck with him. It is not bitter. Burl is not a bitter man. It is worse than bitter, it is flat, and it goes: they are the family and I am the one that helps out.

Then in the spring the church did something they had not done in years, and let people tell an old one instead of a new one. And Verna Justice, who is seventy-two now, stood up and told about the winter eleven years back when her husband was in the hospital in Lexington and she had no way over there and no money for a room, and she stood in the church parking lot on a Wednesday night with her keys in her hand and could not make herself get in the car and go home to an empty house.

And she said: somebody stayed out there with me. She said, I do not even know how long. She said, he did not say five words and he did not pray over me and he did not tell me one thing was going to be all right, and I have thought about that man in that parking lot every winter since, because he was the one thing God did for me that whole year.

Burl was sitting in the folding chair against the back wall with the keys in his hand.

He had no memory of it. That is the part he keeps coming back to. He had stood out in the cold with a crying woman for the better part of an hour and it had not registered as anything at all. He had filed it under locking up.

The register nobody was reading from

Let me get straight to it, because there is a mistake underneath forty years of that drive home and it is a small one, and small mistakes are the ones that last the longest.

Testimony night is a wonderful thing. It is also not the register. It is a room where some of the things God has done get read out loud by whoever is comfortable standing up, and it has never once been the list of who belongs to Him. Attendance has been read off the wrong sheet for four decades.

Here is the sheet.

And if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise.Galatians 3:29

Read the condition in that sentence, because there is exactly one, and it is not a story. If ye be Christ's. That is the whole entrance. Not whether anything happened to you worth reporting. Not whether it was dramatic. Whose you are, and then heir, and the word heir does not come in sizes.

You are an heir according to the promise, and you were the night you walked up at nineteen and told a man you believed it. Galatians 3:29 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is not running a second, quieter list somewhere for people who never had anything happen. There is one family and one promise, and a man who has never told a story in his life is as far inside it as the loudest witness in the room.

An heir does not audition

Think about what an inheritance actually is, because the word has gone soft on us.

An heir is not somebody who earned a place. An heir is somebody whose name is on a document because of a relationship, and that is the entire mechanism. The quiet son inherits. The son who never made a speech at a family dinner inherits. Nobody at the courthouse asks what he has to show for himself, because the question the document answers is not what he did. It is whose he is.

The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ.Romans 8:16-17

Notice who does the witnessing there. Not you, standing up on a Wednesday. Him, in you, continuously, whether or not there is anything to report this week.

You have the witness of His Spirit in you and you have had it the whole time, and it is written in Romans 8:16 that this is exactly how a person knows they are in. That is not a smaller assurance than a healing. It is a larger one, and it is available on the four miles of road home in the dark when there is nothing else at all.

And I want to say this carefully, because I refuse to hand you a consolation prize. I am not telling you that quiet faith is a lovely alternative for people who miss out. I am telling you that the document does not distinguish. The heir with the story and the heir without it inherit the same estate, and the room has confused the telling of a thing with the having of it.

What you stopped counting

Now the smaller matter, and I put it second on purpose, because it is not what makes you an heir and I will not let it pretend to be.

Burl was in that parking lot. He does not remember it. It was not a story to him because it did not feel like anything, and things that do not feel like anything do not get counted by the person doing them. So a man can stand out in the cold for an hour and be the whole of what God did for a woman that year, and drive home saying nothing ever happens to me.

That is not humility. It is an accounting error, and it runs in both directions. The coffee you have made two thousand times. The rides. The forty years of amen said with a whole heart for somebody else's news, which is a harder thing than most people know. Nobody ever stood up on a Wednesday and told any of that, so you filed it under locking up.

Right now, as you read, God is not looking at a shorter column beside your name than beside anybody else's in that room. Scripture puts every heir on one promise, in Galatians 3:29, and the Holy Spirit has been at work through a quiet man for forty years in rooms where nobody thought to say so out loud.