The Tailgate At Five In The Morning

Same spot both winters. The wide place on Ledbetter Road where the fence corner runs down into the ditch, a quarter mile short of the barn, big enough to get a truck off the blacktop and not much bigger.

Marvin Teague drops the tailgate, kneels on the gravel, puts his forearms on the bed and his forehead on his forearms. Five o'clock, near enough either way. Diesel idling behind him because if he shuts it off in that cold he is asking for trouble. Frost on the bed liner that he can feel through his sleeves inside of a minute. The cattle already coming down the hill on the far side of the fence, because they hear an engine and they do not care what a man is doing on the other side of it.

He is not going to tell you how he came to be praying in a field instead of somewhere with a roof over it, and nobody here is going to ask him. Some of it was other people and some of it was him, which is how it usually goes.

Two winters. Roughly two hundred mornings, allowing for the ones he overslept.

Here is what he has never said out loud, not once, not to his wife, not to the one man he might have said it to.

He suspects it does not count.

Not that God is not real. He would fight you about that. What he suspects is that there is a column somewhere, and a man on his knees on gravel in the dark with a diesel running and cows walking down a hill posts to a different column than what other people are doing at eleven on a Sunday. Lesser. Provisional. Something God accepts the way a bank accepts a check written on a napkin, because it clears, but everybody involved knows what it is.

He has caught himself starting out loud with an apology. I know this isn't much.

He said that in December, out loud, into the bed of a truck, at five in the morning, in a field, to God.

Then one morning near the end of January the fog was down in the bottom when he knelt and it was off the bottom when he got up, and the whole field was standing in that gray first light that comes before there is any sun in it, and he had the very plain impression that he was not the only one out there.

He would not call it anything. Marvin is not a man who calls things anything. He got up off the gravel, shut the tailgate, and went and fed the cows.

But he thought about it all day. He is still thinking about it.

Jacob had a rock for a pillow and no roof at all

There is a night in Genesis that gets told to children with a ladder in it and gets skipped by adults who need it more.

Jacob is running. He has left home badly and he is going somewhere he does not want to go, and the sun goes down on him in open country, so he takes a stone for a pillow because that is what was available, and he lies down in a field. No building. No assembly. No priest within a week's walk. Not one element of what anybody then or now would call the proper setting.

And God comes to him there and speaks to him at length, and Jacob wakes up and says a sentence that has been carrying people ever since.

Surely the LORD is in this place, and I knew it not.

You have been in a place He was in, and your not knowing it did not make Him less present. That is exactly what Genesis 28:16 records, and the Holy Spirit saw to it that the account kept Jacob's ignorance in the sentence rather than editing it out. The same Spirit has been in a field on Ledbetter Road for two winters. Presence was never a thing you had to detect for it to be real.

And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not.Genesis 28:16

Then look at what he says next, because it is the sentence that breaks the arithmetic. He says this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. He is standing in a field. There is no house. There is a rock, some dirt, and a man who slept badly.

What made it the house of God was that God was there. Nothing else made it that, and nothing else has ever made it that anywhere since.

You have not been running a provisional operation. What is written in Acts 17:24 is that God dwelleth not in temples made with hands, and it was said out loud in the most religiously impressive city on earth at the time, and His Spirit has been carrying that fact through every century since. It is already settled. There is no napkin column, and there is no ledger with your mornings in the lesser half of it.

Now let me be plain about what this page will not do, and it will not do it on purpose.

I do not know your situation. I do not know whether there is a door you could walk through this Sunday, or whether it is more complicated than that, or whether it is a great deal more complicated than that. So nothing here is going to tell you to go, and nothing here is going to tell you to stay. A real person acts on what a page tells them, and I do not know your name.

I will not hand you the field as a destination either, or tell you it is the finished article. I do not know that either. What I know is what Scripture says about a man in open country with a rock under his head, and it says considerably more than you have been assuming out there at five in the morning.

And the apology has to go. You were not writing a check on a napkin. Hebrews 4:16 says come boldly, and boldly is not a word you get to trade in for sorry, and the boldness runs on His Spirit rather than on the room, so He brings a man in from a field as readily as from anywhere else. That opening line of yours has no right to stay.