The Bus Stop Arithmetic

The shelter has three walls and the wind is coming from the fourth, so it is doing him no good at all. Rain is running off the edge of the roof in a broken line and hitting the pavement in the same three places. There is a timetable behind scratched plastic with somebody's initials keyed into it, and he has read it four times, and he still could not tell you when the bus comes.

He is sixty-two. His hair is wet at the front because he walked the last hundred yards from the doors without hurrying, and there is a folded paper in his inside pocket that he has not looked at since he put it there.

He is not thinking about the appointment. That is the strange thing. He is doing something else entirely, and he has been doing it since the automatic doors closed behind him.

He is counting.

Not events. Not the list, which he does not need, because a man does not have to itemize what he already carries by weight. He is counting in blocks. There was a stretch that ran about eleven years. There was another one after that, shorter, maybe five. There was a good patch in the middle of it, and he is honest enough not to count that one as lost, which somehow makes the rest worse.

And then he does the other half of the arithmetic, which is the half that made him stop walking.

He puts a number on what is in front of him.

The bus is late. A woman with two full bags comes under the shelter and says something about the weather and he says something back, and both of them are being kind, and neither of them is really there.

He has done this arithmetic before. He does it in the truck. He does it at four in the afternoon on a Tuesday for no reason at all. But standing there with the rain hitting the same three places on the pavement, the sum comes out and sits in front of him with nothing to soften it, and the sum is this: I had more than I thought, I used a lot of it in ways I know exactly, and what is left is not a length of time that impresses anybody.

He is not looking for sympathy. He would be embarrassed by sympathy. He is a man who has always believed that if you do the arithmetic honestly you should be willing to look at the answer.

The bus comes. The doors hiss. He gets on and finds a seat near the back and looks out at the wet road and the arithmetic rides along with him, because it always does, because it gets on the bus with him.

You have stood under that shelter. Maybe not that one. Maybe it was a parking lot or a kitchen chair or a stairwell at work. But you have done the two halves of that count, the years behind and the years ahead, and you have arrived at a number, and you have never once said the number out loud to another human being.

And nobody has ever asked you for it. That is the part that gets you. You have been carrying a sum for years and there has never been anyone in the room with a hand out.

The Count Was Never the Problem

Here is the thing that is going to surprise you. Nothing is wrong with your arithmetic.

You are not exaggerating. You did not misremember. The years you can put dates on really did go the way you know they went, and every attempt anybody has ever made to talk you out of the count has bounced off you, and it should have, because you were right and they were being kind.

You are not being asked to revise the number, and you were never lying to yourself about it. I am not going to soften a thing here. Scripture is willing to say out loud that if the Lord marked iniquities nobody could stand, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a gentler mood about your own history, who lets a man hold an accurate count and stop bleeding from it.

The problem was never the sum. The problem is that you have been the only one holding it. A count with no one to hand it to is not accounting, it is a sentence, and you have been serving it under a bus shelter in the rain for a very long time.

And one thing more, before we go a step further, because it matters and this house will not skip it. If part of what you are counting was not freely chosen, if you were worn down into it, or leaned on, or too young to have any real say in it, then hear this plainly: a pushed signature is not a signature. Those years belong to a different conversation and there is no bill in front of you for them here.

You have been carrying something that was never yours to hold alone. His word says that with the Lord there is mercy, and the same Spirit who put that sentence into a psalm of ascent is the one carrying it up a wet street to a man with his collar turned up.

Plenteous Is a Strange Word to Choose

Psalm 130 is written by somebody at the bottom of something. It opens out of the depths and it does not pretend otherwise. And then, near the end, it puts down a word that a careful man would not have chosen:

Let Israel hope in the LORD: for with the LORD there is mercy, and with him is plenteous redemption.Psalm 130:7

Plenteous. Not sufficient. Not adequate to the case. Not enough, if you are careful.

Plenteous means there is more of it than the situation requires, and it means the surplus is the point. It is the word you use for a table that has too much on it, laid by somebody who was not doing arithmetic when they laid it.

Take that word and hold it up against your sum. Your count is finite. It has edges. You can say the years by their dates. And what Scripture puts opposite that finite, edged, accurate number is not a matching amount. It is a word that means more than the count needs and more than the count could use.

You are standing in front of a redemption that is larger than your arithmetic. Psalm 130:7 calls it plenteous, which is a word chosen on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as relief instead of as poetry.

Notice what He does not do with the years, because this is where most of us have been quietly injured. He does not ask you to make them mean something first. There is no requirement that you extract a lesson from them, no obligation to turn the stretch you regret into a story with a moral in it so that it can be filed. That demand has been laid on hurting men for generations and it is not in this psalm and it is not in His mouth.

He takes them. That is all. And the record of them stands, because He does not tidy a man's life away in order to keep him, and the verdict over you is changed, because He has the right to change it and He has already used the right.

You have a Redeemer who takes the years without asking you to justify them. It is written that with Him is plenteous redemption, and the Spirit is the one who holds that steady in a man on the afternoons when the sum comes back.