The Ramp at the Loading Dock

There are four steel steps up to the dock, and the handrail is worn shiny in one spot from thirty years of hands, and he does not use them.

Ten past six, the yard, the roller door going up with that rattle that wakes the whole street. Two trucks in already. Somebody has left the radio on in the shop from Friday. The steps are right there, straight up from where the men park, and every one of them takes the steps because that is where the steps are. Down at the far end, past the recycling bin and the pallets stacked three high, there is a concrete ramp, because forklifts and pallet jacks cannot do stairs.

He takes the ramp. Eleven extra strides. He has taken it every working day for two years.

The first week he made a joke of it, said he wanted to see the yard, said he liked the walk. After that he stopped saying anything, because a man who explains a route twice has told everybody there is something to explain. So now he just goes that way, coffee in hand, unhurried, and by the time the crew is on the dock he is on the dock, and it costs him about nine seconds.

Nobody on that crew knows. He made a decision two years ago on his own, in a truck, in a parking lot, and he has never told one person about it. Not his foreman. Not the man he has eaten lunch beside since before either of them had gray in their beards.

He is not dying. That is the thing that makes this so hard to say out loud. Nothing about it is an emergency. It is just permanent, as far as anybody can tell, and it is not going to be a story, and the eleven strides are how he gets to work now.

That is you, perhaps, on your own ramp. Your own version of the long way around, invented quietly, defended with a joke the first week and with silence ever since. And the thing that wears you thin is not the strides. It is the arithmetic you now run before every ordinary thing, and the fact that you run it alone.

The eleven extra strides

Let me get one thing off the table first, because if I leave it there it will sit under everything else.

This is not a lesser emergency. It is not a small version of a real one. Nobody is going to put a countdown on it and that does not make it a footnote, and I refuse to talk to you as though your life were the abbreviated edition of somebody else's.

And it is not a faith problem that has run long. I want to be blunt, because that lie is usually delivered gently. Two years of taking the ramp is not two years of failing to believe something. It is not evidence about you. Whatever anybody has implied, out loud or with their face, nobody here failed to have enough faith. That sentence is not in the book and it is not true, and it does not get to ride along in the truck with you.

Now look at what Moses said over Asher, at the very end of his life, blessing the tribes one by one.

Thy shoes shall be iron and brass; and as thy days, so shall thy strength be.Deuteronomy 33:25

Shoes of iron and brass. Not a smoother road. Not a promise that the ground would be different. Footwear built for the actual ground, so a man could walk on what was really there. That is the blessing, and I have always thought it was one of the most honest sentences in the Old Testament.

You are not a smaller emergency than the men who go up the steps. Deuteronomy 33:25 hands out shoes rather than shortcuts, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a blessing spoken over a tribe and sets it down on a concrete ramp at ten past six.

You have shoes made for the ground you actually walk on, and that is written rather than wished. The same Spirit who carried that word to Asher is the one carrying it now, and He did not attach it to a road being repaved first.

As thy days, so shall thy strength be

Then the second half of the verse, and it is the half I would put on the wall of that shop if they let me.

As thy days, so shall thy strength be. Measured out by the day. Not by the week, not by the year, not in a lump you can hold up and inspect and worry about the size of. What you have is today's, and today's is what today asks for. If you have tried to lift Thursday with Monday's strength and found it would not go, that is not weakness. That is you attempting a load nobody issued you the strength for, because it has not been Thursday yet.

Here is where the honest thing goes, and I am putting it in the middle rather than at the end. God heals. Bodies, ordinary ones, and Scripture says it far too plainly for me to hedge it, and this site exists to say it in daylight. And I do not promise you the result, not the shape of it and not the timing, and no honest voice can. We say back what He has said and the current is His. If the ramp is still the ramp in year five, that is not a verdict on you and it never was.

And none of it stands against the people caring for your body. Keep your appointments, take what you have been given to take, use whatever makes the day work. The God who blesses a man with iron shoes is not in competition with anybody who helps him walk.

Shame that made you take the long way quietly has no right to stay. Deuteronomy 33:25 makes the route a matter of equipment rather than a matter of standing, and it is His Spirit, not the opinion of a crew, who says what your standing is.

Now, the hiding. I am not going to tell you to announce anything to anybody, and I am not going to make a project out of your privacy. Your business is yours. But hear the difference between privacy and hiding, because you know it better than I do. Privacy costs nothing. Hiding costs nine seconds of walking and about four hours of thinking, every day, for two years. You were never asked to carry that second thing. It got added on and nobody signed for it.

And one more thing, plainly, because I would rather say it and not need to. If the arithmetic has taken you somewhere darker than tired, if you have caught yourself thinking the crew would get along fine without you, tell one human being today and not tomorrow. In the United States, call or text 988. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one person who can sit with you tonight. A page cannot do that. You deserve a person in the room.