I can’t come over, I have to take my pet fish for a walk.

The dog ate my homework.

You’ve heard all of these. Some of them probably sound familiar coming out of your own mouth. One of them is outlandish on purpose.

Here’s the thing though. Every one of them could be true. A dog really could eat your homework. You really might not feel like it, for a reason or for no reason at all. And I don’t know, maybe somebody out there has figured out how to walk a fish. Science does strange things.

But if we’re being honest, guys and gals, most of the time that isn’t what’s happening. Most of the time we say something to save face.

A couple weeks back I wrote about there being one truth, and that it isn’t yours or mine. This is that same truth pointed the other direction. At myself.

A white lie is still a lie

We soften it by calling it white. Doesn’t change what it is. Dressing a lie in white doesn’t make it honest.

Usually we tell ourselves we’re protecting the other person’s feelings. Sometimes that’s even true. But a lot of the time we’re protecting our own, because the honest answer means admitting something about ourselves.

You don’t want to go to your friend’s house.

You don’t want to do the homework.

You don’t want to practice.

“So stop telling lies. Let us tell our neighbors the truth, for we are all parts of the same body.”

Ephesians 4:25

I carry a guitar in my truck

I’ve learned to play it a little. I don’t play it enough.

I can give you reasons. I’m tired, which is true. I don’t feel great, which is sometimes true. There are a hundred other things I could be doing, which is always true.

The actual answer is simpler. I’m choosing to do something else.

That’s it. No story required. I’d rather do the other thing, and the guitar sits in the case another night.

Saying it plainly is uncomfortable. It’s also the only honest version.

The junk food

My wife meal preps for me. She makes healthy food for the week so I’ve got real nourishment out here instead of whatever’s sitting by the register.

And I kept gaining weight.

There’s no mystery here, and I want to be careful how this gets told. It would be easy to say I don’t know what’s going on and let her stand in the kitchen wondering what she’s doing wrong. That’s a lie by omission, and it puts it on her.

The truth is I have a junk food problem. Out here I buy candy, chips, cookies, whatever’s at the counter when I stop. That has nothing to do with her cooking. That’s my decisions.

I know it’s my decisions, because when I stopped for a week my body responded immediately. No hidden cause. Just the obvious one.

It isn’t something I’m proud of, and it’s still something I battle with. But it’s mine.

The trailer in Iowa

The bigger version of this cost me most of a day.

I was at a vendor in Iowa picking up a load. It was dark. I had a flashlight. I was well ahead of schedule, which somehow makes it worse. I hooked up to a trailer and pulled out.

Got down the road to a CAT scale and my weight was nowhere close to what it should have been. Pulled off the scale, walked to the back of the trailer.

Not only was it the wrong trailer. It was empty.

Call to dispatch. Two to three hours back the way I came. And by the time I got there the vendor had already called my dispatcher to say the driver signed for this load and it’s still sitting on our dock.

Half a day gone, at least. Then back to the scale, then into the rail yard, way behind where I should have been.

What actually happened

I check two things on every pickup. Trailer number against the paperwork, and seal number against the paperwork. Two checks, and they catch different mistakes.

I checked one. I did not check the seal.

I was out of my routine and I was in a hurry, and I skipped the step that would have caught it in thirty seconds.

I could have built an excuse. It was dark. The yard was laid out badly. Somebody moved a trailer. All of that would have been at least partly true, and none of it would have changed the fact that I didn’t do my second check.

So I told my dispatcher exactly that. I missed the seal. That’s on me.

There were consequences from the company, and they were fair. I’d have had a harder time respecting them if there hadn’t been.

“People who conceal their sins will not prosper, but if they confess and turn from them, they will receive mercy.”

Proverbs 28:13

Would you respect the excuse?

Think about the last time somebody gave you a story you didn’t believe. Not a lie about anything serious. Just a thin reason for why they couldn’t do something.

Now imagine they’d said instead, honestly, I just don’t want to.

Which one would you respect more?

I know my answer. I’d rather have somebody tell me straight that they don’t want to come over than sit through a story we both know isn’t true. I’m a grown man. I can hear it.

You’d rather play video games than mow the grass? Fine. At least you said it.

Own it, then learn from it

We all make mistakes. Nobody out here is perfect and nobody’s asking you to be.

The part that matters is what you do after. Own it. Be honest about it. Then learn from it and try not to let it happen again.

That’s what I tell my kids. Apologize, own what you did, learn from it, and we move on. I’m not going to harp on you past that.

And when there’s something you just don’t want to do, skip the excuse and skip the justification. Try the harder sentence instead.

I’m not prioritizing that right now. It isn’t important enough to me today.

That’s a rough thing to say out loud. It’s rougher to hear yourself say it, because then you have to look at what you are prioritizing instead.

Which is probably the whole point. We make time for what we care about. The excuses are usually just a nicer way of not admitting what that is.

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Here’s what the rest of my week looked like.

I had a life influenced by lust and not by love, and I really didn’t understand the difference then. I was drinking. I cussed like it was a second language. I watched things I had no business watching. Every worldly thing you can think of, I had a working relationship with.

And I still had the worship music on in the car.

I Wasn’t Living It

That’s the part that took me years to see.

I was doing all the right-looking things. Church on Sunday. Sermons after. Worship music playing. If you had watched me for one hour on a Sunday morning you would have said there goes a Christian man.

I wasn’t living it. I was consuming it.

“But don’t just listen to God’s word. You must do what it says. Otherwise, you are only fooling yourselves.”

James 1:22

Fooling yourselves. Not fooling everybody else. That verse doesn’t say the people around you are deceived. It says you are.

And I was. I thought I was in decent shape with God, because I was showing up and I was listening. Nobody ever told me that listening was the easy part.

The Stories We Tell

Here’s one nobody talks about.

I’d get on the phone with guys I don’t talk to anymore and go straight back to who we used to be. Cussing up a storm. Talking about lust. Talking about the substances, the nights we barely remember, the things we ought to be sick about.

We weren’t confessing any of it. We were telling it like a highlight reel.

That’s what got me. I wasn’t out doing those things anymore. I was doing something else. I was making them sound good. I was keeping them alive and giving them a warm place to sit, and I was doing it in the car and at home around people I used to run with.

I don’t talk to any of them now. Not because anybody had a falling out. I just changed, and the conversations stopped working.

“Such people claim they know God, but they deny him by the way they live.”

Titus 1:16

You can stop doing a thing and still be selling it.

Then I Started Driving

Once I was out here, Sunday morning stopped being an option. No service. No lunch after. So I started having church in the truck.

Sermons between stops. Books. Scripture in the bunk.

And I was still listening to music that was worldly and about lust. Still cussing. Still telling the old stories like they were something to be proud of. I had a lot of room to grow and I did not know how much.

But the seeds were going in. All that listening and reading, month after month, mile after mile. It took a long time for any of it to take root.

Praise God it did.

Zero to Ten

I heard a pastor describe it on a podcast once and it’s stuck with me ever since.

Say zero is no faith at all. Say ten is all in. Hardcore, evangelizing, discipling, Bible nerd, the whole thing.

Most people don’t start at zero. Maybe you were baptized as a baby. Maybe your folks took you to church and you went along. That puts you at a one or a two before you ever decided anything.

Then life happens. You meet somebody. You sit through something. Somebody says a thing that sticks. And you move. Two to three. Three to four.

You almost never jump. You inch.

That’s what the whole stretch I just described actually was. Sunday mornings with a wreck of a week attached, then years in a truck with sermons playing and the same habits running underneath. I thought I was either in or out. I was neither. I was at a four and I couldn’t have told you that.

The Fourth Man in the Furnace

Then God put the right people in front of me.

One man in particular. He mentored me, and he set my soul on fire in the best way. Game on. Let’s go.

You know the story in Daniel 3. Three men get thrown into the furnace and the king looks in and counts four walking around loose in there, and the fourth one doesn’t look like the others. A lot of us read that fourth man as Christ himself.

That’s what a mentor does. He doesn’t stand outside the fire and holler instructions. He gets in there with you.

He and I don’t talk much anymore. That’s alright. He served his purpose in my life, and I don’t say that coldly. God put him where I needed him for as long as I needed him.

Now I’m trying to be that for somebody else. Which is most of why this publication exists.

So Where Does It Come From?

Now the questions, and understand I’m asking them of myself first.

Are you going to the new horror movie? Meeting everybody at the haunted house tonight, the one that’s supposed to be really scary? Got music on that you know isn’t pointing anywhere good? Watched the latest one, full of language and bodies?

I’m not going to rule on every one of those. I’d be a hypocrite twice over and I’ve got no interest in that.

But it’s fair to ask where a thing comes from. Fear. Lust. Somebody’s worst decade dressed up as a good time. Does that come from Jesus, or does it come from the other one?

And who is it pointing at? God, or me?

“Do not love this world nor the things it offers you, for when you love the world, you do not have the love of the Father in you. For the world offers only a craving for physical pleasure, a craving for everything we see, and pride in our achievements and possessions.”

1 John 2:15-16

Pleasure, wanting, and pride. I can sort everything I just confessed into one of those three columns without much effort.

Most of Us Don’t Get a Sunday Morning

Here’s why I’m writing this to you and not to a room full of people in pews.

Most of us out here don’t get a Sunday morning at all. No service. No lunch after. No hour a week where we put on the cleaned-up version and sit somewhere people can see it.

Which means we’ve got nothing to hide behind.

A man who can’t get to church has no Sunday self. Whatever he is, he’s that on Tuesday afternoon in Amarillo with nobody watching and nobody to perform for. There’s no clean hour to point at when he starts wondering where he stands.

That’s harder in one way and a whole lot more honest in another.

Where Are You on the Scale?

You’re somewhere on it right now. So am I. Neither of us is at ten and neither of us is as far along as we’d tell somebody at a fuel island.

The good news is you don’t have to jump. You just have to move one notch, and the next notch usually shows up as a person.

So here’s the question I’d leave you with, since I already know what mine used to be.

If nobody ever saw you in a pew, what could anyone tell about your faith?

I was in one every week, and it still wouldn’t have told you much.

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Mine was a 50-piece nugget on a late arrival day.

I was a senior in high school. I was sitting with a friend I had known since kindergarten, who is in heaven now. And something came over the radio about a plane hitting a tower.

Was it an accident? Was it worse than that? Is anybody okay? What are they even talking about?

We got to school and almost every classroom had a television on. No lesson plan. Just live news, and the whole thing unfolding in front of us in real time.

That night the sky was completely quiet. No contrails, no lights moving, nothing. Just stars and the moon. I had never seen a sky like that before and I have not seen one since.

What just happened.

The Part I Set Alarms For

Thousands of people died that day. Many more died in the twenty years of war that followed. And there are people still dying from what they breathed in standing on that pile, which most of us never count.

Twenty-five years later, I can’t stand at a ceremony. I’m going to be somewhere between a shipper and a receiver with a load on. So I keep the day a different way.

I have alarms set in my phone.

8:46 a.m. North tower struck.

9:03 a.m. South tower struck.

9:37 a.m. Pentagon struck.

9:59 a.m. South tower fell.

10:03 a.m. Flight 93 goes into a field in Pennsylvania.

10:28 a.m. North tower fell.

5:20 p.m. Building 7 fell.

Seven alarms. Most of them go off while I’m rolling. The interstate doesn’t stop for any of them. Traffic keeps moving, the load still has to get there, and nobody in the lane next to me knows what my phone just did.

But I know. And for about ten seconds each time, that cab is quiet.

Why This Is on a Christian Publication

Fair question. Here’s the answer.

God takes what the enemy meant for evil and uses it for good. Every time.

“You intended to harm me, but God intended it all for good. He brought me to this position so I could save the lives of many people.”

Genesis 50:20

“And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.”

Romans 8:28

God used it for good.

For the first time in my life, this country came back together. Flags on every porch. People giving blood in lines around the block. Strangers being decent to each other for no reason. Was everybody treated right in those months? No. There were people who got persecuted for how they looked and where their family came from, and that was wrong, and I’m not going to sit here and justify it.

But we were as united as I have ever seen us.

Twenty-Five Years Later

I’m forty-three now. And in all forty-three of those years, I have never seen this country more divided than it is right now.

The enemy is still the enemy. He was working that morning and he is working right now, and division is one of his favorite tools because he doesn’t have to knock anything down to use it. He just has to get us looking at each other instead of at God.

“Then if my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sins and restore their land.”

2 Chronicles 7:14

A Prayer for Today

Heavenly Father,

Twenty-five years ago today a lot of people went home to you, and a lot more followed over the two decades after. I pray they are with you. I pray their families have found comfort, and refuge, and solace in you, because there isn’t anywhere else to find it.

Father God, in Jesus’ name, I pray that you bring us back together as a nation. We need you more than we have needed you in a long time, and most of us haven’t admitted that out loud yet.

I pray for the families who are marking today without somebody. I pray for the ones we lost. And I pray for all of us who are still here and still moving forward.

In Jesus’ most holy name, Amen.

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And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

John 8:32

Wow. Okay. But what does that actually mean?

Some pastors talk about preaching every word. Slow down and take the verse a piece at a time instead of swallowing it whole. I'm not preaching here, but there are some words in this one worth stopping on.

First, the part everybody skips

Verse 32 gets quoted by itself constantly. But it starts in verse 31, and the sentence doesn't work without it.

Jesus said to the people who believed in him, "You are truly my disciples if you remain faithful to my teachings. And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."

John 8:31-32

There's a condition on it. Remain faithful to my teachings. The knowing comes after the following, not before it.

That's worth sitting with. You don't get handed the truth and then decide whether to follow. You follow, and then you come to know.

And you

You is us. Not scholars, not pastors, not people with the right background. Us.

A guy in a bunk at eleven at night with a dome light on. That's who this was said to. Regular people who believed him.

Will know

Not might. Not could, if you work hard enough at it.

Will.

The truth

Here's where we get in trouble.

We think we know the truth. We've got our truth. Everybody's got their truth now, and we're told to live it and speak it and honor everybody else's while we're at it.

That isn't what this says. It says the truth. One of them.

And a few chapters later Jesus says exactly what it is:

Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me."

John 14:6

The truth isn't a concept. It's a person. So let's read it again with that in mind.

You will know Jesus, and Jesus will set you free.

That hits different than the coffee mug.

Set you free

Free from what, though? I've got a mortgage and a schedule and a truck I have to be in at four in the morning. What am I being set free from?

Free from wondering what's true. From the exhausting work of assembling your own truth out of whatever the world handed you this year, and then defending it.

Free from doubt about where you stand.

Free from a life of never repenting, where you carry every bit of it yourself because there's nowhere to set it down.

Free from not being saved. Free to be saved, through Jesus Christ.

That's not freedom from your obligations. You'll still be in that truck at four. It's freedom from carrying what was never yours to carry.

Put it together

C.S. Lewis wrote a book called Mere Christianity. Not the impressive kind, not the credentialed kind. Just Christians.

That's us. Mere Christians. And if mere Christians remain in his teaching, we come to know the truth, and the truth is Christ, and Christ leads us to salvation.

That's the whole verse. It just takes a minute to get there.

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Ever heard somebody say that? “But God.” Two words, and if you’ve been around the church any length of time you’ve heard it a hundred times.

It’s the turn in the sentence. It’s what comes after the part you can’t fix.

My finances are a wreck and I have no idea how we’re going to work it out. But God does.

I’m in the middle of a hard breakup, a divorce I never saw coming, and I struggle to get out of bed. But God has a plan.

I lost a good job. It was my whole identity. I spent years being one thing and now I have to figure out who I am. But God knows.

I think we can all relate to at least one of those. Some of us to all three.

We’re not supposed to know

Here’s what I think most of us actually struggle with. It isn’t the hard thing itself. It’s not knowing.

We want the layout. We want to see how it works out before we agree to walk through it. And we don’t get that. We never get that.

It’s right there in the name. The unknown. By design, we’re not supposed to know it.

“My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,” says the Lord. “And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine. For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts.”

Isaiah 55:8-9

Read that again. His ways are beyond anything you could imagine. Not beyond what you’ll figure out eventually. Beyond what you’re capable of imagining in the first place.

So when you’re lying in the bunk at two in the morning trying to reason out why this is happening, and you can’t get there, that’s not because you’re not smart enough. It was never on the table.

When I tried to fix it myself

Some years back my wife and I were moving from Northwest Indiana down to South Carolina. Our lease was up on the apartment we were renting, and the date was coming fast. Down to the day we had to be out, and we had nowhere to go on the other end.

I want to be honest about what that felt like. My wife and I are the kind of people who take action. Something’s wrong, you fix it. Don’t make excuses, don’t justify it, don’t act like a victim. Own it and work the problem.

We didn’t make excuses about why it wasn’t working. We put the time in and made it the priority. That’s really what owning it comes down to. Setting the right priorities and being honest about what actually matters to you. More on that another time.

We made calls. Got a hold of somebody renting townhouses in South Carolina. The one we asked about wasn’t available. But another was about to open up, and we could be first to apply.

We got it. And my wife ended up with a job at a school literally down the street.

That’s not something I arranged. I didn’t know that school was there.

A few years in, they raised the rent on the townhouse to where it wasn’t worth staying. Now, we had looked at buying a house before we ever left Indiana, and it didn’t work out. At the time that felt like a door closing. Looking back, it was timing.

Because when we finally did buy, we qualified, we got the mortgage, and the house sits fifteen minutes from where I drive out of and twenty from where my wife would end up teaching.

None of that was our plan. Our plan was to buy back in Indiana, and it failed.

God’s timing is always right on time. Just not on our time.

Owning it didn’t solve this. It got us on the phone making calls, and that was our part to do. It didn’t put a townhouse in front of us that happened to sit down the street from a school my wife would end up teaching at. I couldn’t have arranged that if I’d tried.

Do your part. Then let go of the part that was never yours.

It’s supposed to be hard

I’ll say the thing nobody wants to hear. It’s tough. And it’s supposed to be.

Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles of any kind come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. For you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow, for when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, needing nothing.

James 1:2-4

The hurdles aren’t in the way of something. They’re doing something. Endurance doesn’t come from an easy stretch of road, and neither does anything else worth having.

That doesn’t make it feel better at two in the morning. But it does change what you think is happening to you.

He’s already out ahead of you

Through all of it, here’s the part to hold onto.

Be strong and courageous! Do not be afraid and do not panic before them. For the Lord your God will personally go ahead of you. He will neither fail you nor abandon you.

Deuteronomy 31:6

Personally go ahead of you. Not watching from somewhere. Out in front, already there.

You don’t know the plan. You’re not going to. We think we have a plan, but God has a better one.

That’s the whole thing. That’s why the two words work.

If you drive and you’re working out your faith on the road, that’s what we write about here. Two posts a week.

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So I went looking. It took longer than it should have, because most of what comes up isn't built for a man reading in a bunk.

About matching your translation

The clean advice is to match your print Bible to whatever you listen to. Same words in your ear and on the page, so you're not sorting out two versions of a verse at eleven at night.

I don't do that. Through the Word has NLT. I listen in NIV anyway, because I couldn't stand the narrator on the NLT track. Forty minutes a day with a voice that grates on you means you quit listening. A translation you don't listen to teaches you nothing.

So I read NLT and listen to NIV. Not ideal. The two are close enough that it hasn't given me any trouble.

The point still holds, just not how I expected. Pick what you'll actually stick with. That goes for the voice in your ear same as the words on the page.

Readable beats precise

I looked hard at NASB 95 for a while. Most word for word translation you can get in English. If you want to dig into exactly what the Greek says, that's the one.

It's also hard to read for forty minutes straight. It keeps the original sentence structure, so it comes out choppy.

Here's what I had to admit. The Bible that teaches you the most is the one you keep reading. Not the most precise one you open twice. NLT reads easy, it's a real translation from the original languages, and I get through more of it. That's the whole argument.

If you want to compare a verse word for word, Blue Letter Bible is free on your phone.

Get large print, and mean it

You're reading on a bunk, at night, by a dome light, probably tired. Standard print is fine at a kitchen table with good lighting. It is not fine in a sleeper at eleven o'clock.

Large print. Every time. It's the thing most people skip, and then they wonder why they stopped reading.

Study notes, and which kind

Two different things get called study Bibles. They do different jobs.

Background notes explain what's going on. Who's talking, why it mattered to the people who first heard it, how the book fits the whole story.

Application notes tell you what a verse means for how you live.

I went with the NLT Life Application Study Bible. Verse by verse, application focused. It's the best selling study Bible in print for a reason.

If you want more background than application, the NLT Study Bible does that instead. Neither one is wrong. Just know which one you're buying.

What I'd skip, and what I wouldn't

The men's devotional Bibles are fine at what they do. Topical readings on temptation, work, marriage, anger, scattered through the text. If you want a paperback devotional, that's a real option.

Just know it's not a study Bible. It won't tell you who the Ptolemies were in Daniel 11. Two different jobs. Buy it for the job it does.

I get my devotionals from an app instead. I use Glorify. That keeps the print Bible free to do the one thing a book does better than a phone, which is sit open on your lap while you actually stay with a passage.

Get a case, and expect that to be hard

Buy one. A Bible loose in a truck gets beat up fast.

Here's what nobody tells you. If you buy a full study Bible, finding a case that fits is its own project. Mine is 7.4 by 9.9 with a 2.3 inch spine, and most Bible cases don't go that thick. I spent a long time looking. Most of what's out there is built for a thinline or a compact.

Measure yours first. Length, width, and spine. Then read the listing carefully, because most cases give a maximum size and not an exact one, and the max is what you have to clear.

I landed on an RXW MOLLE style case. High density foam padding, semi rigid so it holds its shape. I looked at a briefcase style one first, but the reviews were mixed and a lot of them were Vine reviews. I don't put much weight on those. The one I bought had fewer reviews and all of them verified.

It came in bigger than my Bible on two sides, which turned out fine. I fill the extra room with a notebook, plus highlighters and pens made for Bible paper. Regular pens and regular highlighters bleed straight through and ruin the page underneath. Now it all travels in one bag instead of rolling around the cab.

The short version

NLT Life Application Study Bible, large print, imitation leather, red letter. A padded case that actually fits it, with a notebook and Bible safe pens inside.

But the real answer is simpler than any of that. The best Bible is the one that's in your truck next week. I spent too long shopping and not enough time reading. Pick one that fits your hours and your eyes, order it, and quit looking.

If you drive and you're working out your faith on the road, that's what we write about here. Two posts a week.

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