It was one of the most used CB codes out there, and it is the most practical one. Nobody can help you, route you, meet you, or warn you about what is ahead until they know where you are sitting right now.

Not where you are headed. Not where you were this morning. Where you are.

The box

I think a lot of us treat being a Christian like checking a box.

You go to church. You pray. Maybe you read your Bible, maybe you do not. Maybe you own one, maybe you do not. Box checked, and that is about where it ends.

I do not think most people really know what the rest of it involves. The sacrifice. The discipline. The obedience. The actual work that gets done on a man through Him, which is not comfortable and does not happen on a schedule you pick.

I say that as somebody who checked the box for years. I was a Christian. I believed it. I also did what I wanted, went to church once in a while, and did not open a Bible at all.

If somebody had asked me “my twenty” back then, I would have told them I was a Christian. True answer. Useless answer. It said nothing about where I actually was.

The first honest answer I gave

When I started talking with the men I started walking with, early on, one of them asked me about reading scripture.

And I told him the truth. I said I do not really read my Bible much. I feel pulled to do it. I just do not.

I could have said something better than that. It would have been easy, and he would not have known the difference.

What he said back was simple. That pull is probably God telling you to do it. Maybe you should.

And I did. Not that day, and not perfectly. But that conversation is where it started, and it only started because I gave him my actual twenty instead of the one that sounded better.

You cannot be routed from a position you are not at

That is the whole thing, and any driver already understands it.

If you give a bad “twenty”, everything after it is wrong. The directions do not work. The help goes to the wrong place. Whoever is trying to reach you ends up somewhere you are not, and you sit there wondering why nothing is getting better.

Men do this constantly. Somebody asks how you are doing with God and you give the position you wish you were at, or the one you were at five years ago, or just the one that ends the conversation fastest.

Nobody can do anything with that.

“If we claim we have no sin, we are only fooling ourselves and not living in the truth. But if we confess our sins to him, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all wickedness.”

1 John 1:8-9

Notice it does not say clean yourself up and then come tell Him. It says tell Him.

He already knows your twenty

Here is the part that should take the pressure off.

You are not giving God information He does not have. He is not waiting on the radio to find out where you are. The honesty is not for His benefit.

It is for yours, and for whoever is trying to walk with you.

“Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. Point out anything in me that offends you, and lead me along the path of everlasting life.”

Psalm 139:23-24

That is a man asking God to tell him his own twenty, because he is not sure he can see it himself. I have prayed some version of that more than once.

So what is it

I am not asking whether you are a Christian. I am asking where you actually are.

When did you last open it. When did you last pray about something that cost you. Is there something you know He has been pulling you toward that you just have not done.

You do not have to answer me. But answer somebody, out loud, and make it the true one.

Mine, for a lot of years, would have been: believer, not reading, not obeying, pretty sure God was fine with it.

He was not fine with it. He was waiting on me to say so.

If you are out on the road and could use a conversation with another believer, hit reply when you are parked. No pressure and nothing to join.

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A man standing in a yard full of rakes, tines up. He steps on one and the handle comes around and catches him in the face. He staggers back, steps on another one, and takes that handle too.

He is not stupid. He can see the rakes. He just cannot seem to find a way through the yard.

I have been that man more times th…

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You use it when the transmission broke up, or there was too much noise, or you just were not paying attention. Say again. I did not copy that.

Nobody takes offense at it. The guy repeats himself and you move on.

I used to say it out loud

For years I made the same joke with my buddies.

Can’t wait for my next toxic relationship. Can’t wait to meet my future ex-wife.

I thought that was funny. I was announcing the pattern out loud, in front of people, and laughing about it. And then going right back out and doing it again.

That went on well into my thirties.

Maybe it is not just them

A friend and I were having a couple of drinks one night, and I had just finished explaining every way my relationship at the time was falling apart. All her fault, obviously.

He listened to the whole thing, like he always did. Then he said something about how I keep ending up in the same kind of relationships and getting the same results, and maybe it is not just about them.

I laughed it off. I thought he was messing with me.

Then I realized he was serious, and it hit different.

We talked about it more that night, and more later on. And I started going back through my past relationships to check what he said against what actually happened.

He was right. There was a pattern, and it was my behavior.

It took a few months for the full weight of that to land on me. Not because I did not hear him. Because I did not want it to be true.

Spinning my tires

Here is how I understand it now.

God shows you what you are doing wrong by letting you keep making the same mistake, hoping you will eventually learn something from it.

Or not. That part is up to you.

I kept spinning my proverbial tires until I finally learned that I was my own biggest problem. That is a long way to go for a lesson somebody could have told me in one sentence, and somebody did tell me in one sentence, and I still needed years after that.

“The LORD says, ‘I will guide you along the best pathway for your life. I will advise you and watch over you. Do not be like a senseless horse or mule that needs a bit and bridle to keep it under control.’”

Psalm 32:8-9

He is willing to guide you. He would rather not have to drag you.

Years of driving, and then this

Now here is the part that keeps me honest.

Back around 2018 or so, years into driving for a living, I was out in my car. Got impatient behind somebody and took a stupid chance to get around them. Short distance. It saved me nothing. Did it right by a police station, and I was definitely speeding.

I spend all week in a truck watching people do exactly that and shaking my head at them.

I caught it immediately, which I guess is progress. But let us be honest about what happened there. I had learned to despise it when other people do it. I had not entirely learned not to do it.

Those are two different things, and I think a lot of us have the first one confused for the second one.

That was seven or eight years ago and I have grown a lot since then. That night was part of how I got here. But growing is not a finish line, and I still catch myself doing things I know better than to do, and I am still disappointed in myself every time.

“As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his foolishness.”

Proverbs 26:11

That one is not gentle either. Most of the ones worth reading are not.

Say again

If something keeps showing up in your life, the same argument, the same kind of person, the same mistake with a different name on it, that is not bad luck.

That is a 10-9. The message did not get through the first time, so here it comes again.

And He does not get frustrated and quit transmitting. He does not take offense that you needed it repeated. He will say it again, and again, for as long as it takes.

The question is whether you are going to copy it this time, or make Him say it one more time.

If you are out on the road and could use a conversation with another believer, hit reply when you are parked. No pressure and nothing to join.

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Breaker breaker 19, can I get a radio check? And somebody would come back. Lima Charlie. Loud and clear. Ten-four.

That was the whole exchange. No conversation after it, most of the time. Nobody asked how my day went and I did not ask about theirs. I just needed to know the signal was getting out, and somebody I would never meet took two seconds to tell me it was.

The channel is quiet now

Hardly anybody runs a CB anymore.

You can leave one on for days and never hear a thing. Not because there is nobody out there. There are trucks all around you at any given time. It is because the radios are off.

Everybody has headphones in. Everybody is on the phone with somebody at home, or listening to something, or not talking to anyone at all.

A whole lot of men parked within a few hundred feet of each other, every one of them alone, and any one of them would answer if his radio was on.

What 10-4 actually means

People outside of trucking think 10-4 means yes, or okay, or I agree.

It does not. It means message received. I heard you. It got through.

That is smaller than agreement and it is worth more than people think. When a man tells you something heavy, most of the time he is not asking you to fix it. He is transmitting and he wants to know it landed somewhere.

A lot of us are terrible at that. Somebody starts telling us something real and we start loading up advice before he finishes the sentence. What he needed was ten-four.

“Understand this, my dear brothers and sisters: You must all be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to get angry.”

James 1:19

Transmitting into nothing

Here is the part I keep coming back to.

When you key up, you have no idea if anything is getting out. Your radio does not tell you. You could be transmitting perfectly and there could just be nobody on the channel.

Or your antenna could be gone. I knew a guy who was driving down the road talking on the CB, and all of a sudden there was a plume of feathers and no antenna. A bird took out his antenna and itself at the same time. He kept right on talking, not realizing nothing was going out.

From the driver’s seat it sounds the same either way. Silence.

That is what praying feels like to a lot of men. You say it out loud in the cab at two in the morning and nothing comes back, and you start wondering whether the problem is your signal or whether anybody is listening at all.

I do not have a clean answer for that. What I know is that the silence on the channel was never proof that nobody was out there. It just meant nobody had their radio on.

And a non-answer is still an answer. Sometimes it is no. Sometimes it is not yet. Neither one of those is nobody listening.

And God is not one more truck with the radio off. He is not the one who stopped listening.

“O LORD, you have examined my heart and know everything about me. You know when I sit down or stand up. You know my thoughts even when I’m far away.”

Psalm 139:1-2

Mine is off too

I will say this part honestly, because I am not standing above any of it.

My CB is in a tote at home. The one my truck came with is in a storage box, unplugged, and it has been that way the whole time I have had this truck.

And I did not just drift away from it. I quit turning it on. Most of what I was hearing on there was ignorant, and a lot of it was flat out racist, and I got tired of listening to it.

So more than one thing is true at the same time. You can leave that radio on for days and never hear a word, because everybody else has theirs off. And some of us turned ours off because of what was coming through it.

Either way it ends up in the same place. A man alone in his truck.

But this is on. If you are out on the road and could use a conversation with another believer, hit reply when you are parked. No pressure and nothing to join.

Ten-four.

Published 10:04 a.m. on October 4th. On purpose. If you caught that before you got here, you have been out here a while.

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You know the kind. You get into a new hobby and you want everything for it immediately, and you want to be the best at it by next weekend. Guitar, shooting, whatever your thing is. You buy the gear first and figure out the rest later.

That works for a lot of things in life. Faith is not one of them.

Based on maturity, not age

A pastor said something once that stuck with me, and I am paraphrasing.

A lot of parents hand out cell phones and privileges in the preteen and teenage years based on how old the kid is. He does it based on maturity instead. Do you clean your room the first time you are told? Do you unload the dishwasher when you are asked, or before you are asked? Do you keep your room picked up without somebody standing over you?

Not how many birthdays you have had. Whether you have shown you can handle the responsibility.

Your walk works the same way.

You cannot skip it

You cannot go from raising your hand in church and accepting Him as your Lord and Savior to being a theologian the next week. It does not work like that.

And you especially cannot go from living a worldly life for however many years straight into full theologian mode with a snap of your fingers. It takes work. It takes reflection and repentance. You have to get past comfort, past complacency, and if we are being honest, past apathy.

You have to do it over and over and over again. That is what spiritual maturity actually is.

Crawl, then walk

When you are born, you learn to crawl. Then you learn to walk. Then you learn to talk. Then, a long way down the road, you figure out a 401k and plan for retirement.

Nobody skips to the 401k. You would not even know what the numbers meant.

Peter lays it out the same way, one thing built on the last.

“In view of all this, make every effort to respond to God’s promises. Supplement your faith with a generous provision of moral excellence, and moral excellence with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with patient endurance, and patient endurance with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love for everyone.”

2 Peter 1:5-7

Faith is the floor, not the finish. Every step there sits on the one before it, and there is no jumping to the top.

But do not camp out

Here is the other side of it, and the writer of Hebrews does not soften it at all.

“You have been believers so long now that you ought to be teaching others. Instead, you need someone to teach you again the basic things about God’s word. You are like babies who need milk and cannot eat solid food. For someone who lives on milk is still an infant and doesn’t know how to do what is right. Solid food is for those who are mature, who through training have learned to recognize the difference between right and wrong.”

Hebrews 5:12-14

Through training. Not through feeling like it.

Crawling is where you start. It is not where you set up camp. There is a difference between a man who is new at this and a man who has been at it fifteen years and never left the shallow end.

“So let us stop going over the basic teachings about Christ again and again. Let us go on instead and become mature in our understanding.”

Hebrews 6:1

Why it ends on love

Go back and look at where Peter’s list lands. Faith at the bottom, love for everyone at the top.

That is not an accident, and it took me a long time to understand it.

How can a man know what unconditional love is if he has never been loved that way? You cannot hand somebody something you have never been given.

Maybe you were raised by people who were not loving. Maybe you have never had a healthy relationship with a significant other and you are starting to wonder if that is just how it goes for you.

God. He fills that. I am not going to pretend it makes the hole disappear, and I am not writing this from the other side of it. I have had my own situations and I am still working through some of them.

“We love each other because he loved us first.”

1 John 4:19

That is the order. Not love Him better and then He will love you. He went first.

And that is what maturity is actually for. Not knowing more. Loving better, because you finally know what it is you are handing out.

Start somewhere

Do not expect to be a theologian right off the bat, or ever. Faith is a lifelong thing, same as maturity. But start.

• Start by praying

• Start by going to church

• Start by reading the Bible

• Start by joining a small group

• Start by reading a faith-based book

There are plenty of ways in. Pick one.

When you fall off

You are going to fall off the wagon. Get back on. Rinse. Repeat. Repent.

But understand what repenting is. It is not a get out of jail free card. If you sin and then do the same sin again, repentance means your heart is in the right place and you actually want to fix it. It is an apology to God, and an apology is not a real apology without action behind it.

We are called to always forgive, because we are always forgiven with every repentance, as long as your heart truly is for God. That is grace, and grace is not permission.

Still crawling

Start small. It takes time. That is okay.

Spiritual maturity takes a long time, especially coming out of a very worldly life, which I know something about. There is plenty I am still working on. It is a lifelong process and I am nowhere near done with it.

So do not worry about the 401k yet. Worry about learning who Jesus is and starting a relationship with Him. His love does not have conditions on it, and it is not waiting for you to get good at this first.

Learn to crawl. Then start to walk with Jesus.If you are out on the road and could use a conversation with another believer, hit reply when you are parked. No pressure and nothing to join.

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The point that stuck with me was this. Idolatry is adultery in the eyes of God. Not like adultery. It is the same thing, because you took what belonged to Him and gave it to something else.

“You adulterers! Don’t you realize that friendship with the world makes you an enemy of God? I say it again: If you want to be a friend of the world, you make yourself an enemy of God.”

James 4:4

That is not gentle language, and I do not think it is meant to be.

Both of them are decisions

Here is why the comparison works.

When a man commits adultery, a decision gets made. It is not an accident and it is not a necessity. It is a want.

Same with an idol. Money, success, another woman, another man, a bottle, a phone. Something gets chosen over God, and a decision gets made to choose it.

Except most of the time it does not feel like one decision. Nobody sits down and decides that money matters more than his family. It just gets every minute by default, a hundred small times, and the choice never has to be made out loud.

There is a reason people say a man is married to his job.

The one with the best cover

Work is the sneakiest one, because it comes with a reason nobody questions.

Let me be clear about this part, because I am writing to drivers. Being gone is not the idol. Providing for your family is not the idol. I am out here five or six days a week and that is not me choosing the road over my wife. That is the job that pays for the house she is in.

Necessity is not the same as want. Every man reading this already knows which one he is doing.

The question was never where you are Monday through Friday. The question is what happens with the hours you actually have.

“I’ll talk to you when you get back”

Among the people I talk to, family and drivers both, there is an understanding about this. When a man is home, you leave him alone. “I'll talk to you when you get back, enjoy your home time.” Nobody has to negotiate it and nobody takes it personally. Not everybody does it that way, but close to it.

That understanding only works if I hold up my end of it. So when I am home and somebody calls, I take it quick and I get off. She knows things come up. But I have got five or six days a week out here with nothing but time to be on the phone. That time at home is hers.

The harder one

The phone is easy, because those calls belong to somebody else.

My own work is harder. I have got the business, the app, and more projects going than I should probably admit to. None of it ever tells me it is finished. There is always one more thing, and it is all good work, and that is exactly what makes it dangerous.

A week like this one I drive five and a half, six days. That leaves one day off, and I have got business that has to get done on it.

So I stop. Three o’clock, four, five, earlier when I can, and the rest of that day is hers.

Which means some of the business does not get done that week. That is the whole point. It is not a system where everything fits. It is a decision about what I am willing to leave unfinished.

An idol is the thing you never make wait.

“No one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and love the other; you will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and be enslaved to money.”

Matthew 6:24

Read that again. He does not say you should not serve two. He says you cannot. It is not a warning about splitting your loyalty. It is Him telling you that you are already serving one of them, and the way to find out which is to look at where your time actually went.

What happens when it goes

There is another reason this matters, and it is not about time.

Whatever a man leads with is usually what he is standing on. Listen to how somebody introduces himself. The job. The title. The truck. What he benches. What he has built. You can hear it in the first thirty seconds.

The problem is that every one of those can be taken. The job goes. The body gives out. The reputation gets wrecked by somebody else’s story. The money comes and goes, and a man out here has watched all of it happen to somebody he knows.

And if your identity was in it, you go with it.

Jesus is not a thing you can lose. He is not a title or a paycheck or a body that holds up. He is a person, and He is not going anywhere.

You will leave Him before He ever leaves you.

“Don’t love money; be satisfied with what you have. For God has said, ‘I will never fail you. I will never abandon you.’”

Hebrews 13:5

It goes both ways

This is not me handing my wife time like a favor. She has got her own work, grading and everything else that comes with it, and she stops too. It is reciprocal. We both understand that we have to make time for each other, and we both give something up to do it.

She can also tell me when I am getting it wrong, and I listen. Not because I have to. Because she is right and because I love her.

A man who will not listen to it from his own wife is not going to hear it from anybody else.

I do not always get it right

Sometimes time gets away from me. I get into something and look up and the afternoon is gone. I own that.

I am not writing this as a man who has it handled. I am writing it as a man who has to decide the same thing every single week, and who does not always decide it well.

But I am not going to let work of any kind become a false idol and take over my whole life. Not trucking, not the business, not any of it.

So here is the question I had to ask myself, and I would ask you the same one.

What is the thing in your life that never gets told to wait?

That is the one.

If you are out on the road and could use a conversation with another believer, hit reply when you are parked. No pressure and or nothing else to join.

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It was late and I was at the end of a long shift. This vendor hands you your paperwork, you sign for it, and from there it is on you to grab the right one. Nobody at a gate checking. You just have to do your job right.

I came back out to a very dark lot. I dropped my empty and hooked to the trailer that was supposed to be mine. My flashlight went across the container numbers and they looked close enough.

That was the whole check. I never verified the number against my paperwork. I never walked back and looked at the seal. Close enough, and I left with it.

Every one of those is a step I do every single time. That night I skipped all of them, because I was tired and I wanted to get parked.

The scale

The nearest Cat scale was about two and a half to three hours out, mostly back country roads.

I pulled onto it and the weight came up.

My first thought was, why does that number look like what I weigh empty?

Then the second thought, which was just: what did I do.

I got off the scale, walked to the back, and there was no seal. I opened the doors and looked at an empty container. I had said some things by then that I am not going to repeat here.

That was when it all lined up. I had gone inside and signed for a load, hooked to the wrong trailer, and never looked at it again until I rolled onto that scale.

The phone call

I called my fleet manager myself. It was my mistake, and it needed to come from me.

Turned out she was hearing about it anyway. While I had her on the phone she told me the vendor had just reached out too. Their load was still sitting in their yard, in the container it belonged in, the one on the bill of lading I had signed for and apparently did not take. They must have caught it on a yard check.

She routed me back.

Three hours

Three hours back to the vendor, and then eventually back to a scale to actually weigh out. Plus whatever disciplinary action came from my company, and I took that too.

I owned it. I messed up. I did not make excuses.

Because there was nobody else to hand it to. No dispatcher who sent me a bad load. No vendor who messed up the paperwork. Just me, doing a job I know how to do, cutting a corner I know better than to cut.

Five minutes would have caught it. Instead it cost me more than five hours.

You have got to have a routine, driver

They told us that in onboarding at Walmart, about pre-trip inspections. You have got to have a routine, driver.

The reason is simple. When you get rushed, you get knocked out of your routine, and that is when you make mistakes. Mine takes about the same amount of time every time and goes in the same order every time. Exterior walk-around, interior checks, then paperwork against the trailer to make sure everything matches.

The routine works whether I feel like doing it or not. That is the entire point of it.

I never served, but the sentiment carries over to my career and plenty of others. Fall back on your training. Training does not ask whether you are motivated. It insists on routine and discipline, and it does not care how you feel about it tonight.

Motivation will fail you every time. Anybody who has been out here a while already knows that. But motivation was not the problem that night. Nobody needs to be inspired to walk fifty-two feet and read a number off a seal. That takes discipline, and I did not have any left.

My training did not fail me. I failed to fall back on it because I was tired.

The routine is not there for the nights I am rested and ahead of schedule. It is there for the night the lot is dark and I want to be done. That is the night it is holding me up, and that is the night I set it down.

“If you are faithful in little things, you will be faithful in large ones. But if you are dishonest in little things, you won’t be honest with greater responsibilities.”

Luke 16:10

Same with the walk

You do not read because you feel like reading. You do not pray because you feel like praying. Some days you feel like doing nothing at all and you do it anyway. That is the routine holding you up until the feeling comes back.

By the way, that feeling is also known as motivation.

I skipped my routine because I was tired. I skipped it because it was getting late. I was not rebelling against anything. I just wanted to park the truck for the night.

That was one seal on one trailer. I found out three hours later, and it cost me more than five.

Whether it is giving up on a marriage, quitting a job, or walking away from God, it generally does not come down to one decision. It is a slow drift, and temporary circumstances end up costing you something permanent.

Develop the habit, the routine, and the discipline now. Then in the times when you just do not feel like it, you have something to fall back on, before you lose not just five minutes or five hours, but five years. A marriage. Your health. Your faith.

If you are out on the road and could use a conversation with another believer, hit reply when you are parked. No pressure and nothing to join.

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Out on the flat stretches especially. The sky ahead goes dark, and then you see it coming down. It does not look like rain from that far away. It looks like fog, or like somebody took a paintbrush and dragged it straight down from the clouds to the ground. Long gray strokes, miles wide.

It is one of the most coolest things I have seen out here. It is also something you are about to drive into…

The wall

When you finally get to it, you almost literally hit it. One second the road is dry and the next it is like driving into a wall of water. You hear it before anything else. In a heavy storm it is loud, and it happens fast.

And most of the time, you just keep driving. You slow down, you keep your lane, you hold the wheel.

There is no telling how long it lasts. Some of them are done in a couple of minutes. Some of them go on and on, and you have no way of knowing from the front edge which kind you are looking at.

You can pull up the radar and get an idea. Where you are, where the edge of it is, how wide the whole thing runs. You can do your best to stay out of the worst of it, the dark red and the purple, by timing a break or taking an exit.

Sometimes that works. But storms take a turn. They do not always go the way they are supposed to go…

…Neither does life.

So a lot of the time you do not get a choice, and knowing where the edge is does not get you out of it. The only way to the other side is through it.

And eventually you do come out. Sometimes into sunlight. Sometimes just into clouds and no more rain. You look in the mirror and there it is, that same wall of water, sitting behind you now.

You did not wait for it to stop. You went through it.

“When you go through deep waters, I will be with you. When you go through rivers of difficulty, you will not drown. When you walk through the fire of oppression, you will not be burned up; the flames will not consume you.”

Isaiah 43:2

Notice what that verse does not say. It does not say if you go through deep waters. It says when. And it never once says the water goes away.

When the wipers cannot keep up

But every driver knows there is another kind.

Sometimes the rain comes down so hard that the wipers on high cannot keep up with it. You lose the road. You cannot see the lines, and the cars behind you that do not have their headlights on are virtually invisible in your mirrors.

The more you are carrying, the more that matters. A loaded truck takes a long time to get up to speed, and it takes even longer to stop. Carry enough and you cannot wait until the last second to decide.

That is not the time to push through. That is the time to slow it all the way down, be still, and ride it out until you can see enough to keep going.

The man who drives into every storm at full speed because he thinks that is what tough looks like is the same man who ends up in the ditch. Some storms you drive through. Some you wait out. Knowing which one you are in is most of the wisdom.

“Be still, and know that I am God!”

Psalm 46:10

Still back there

I posted a question a while back that I keep thinking about. Did the storm stop, or did you just finish driving through it?

Most of the time it is the second one. It is still back there. Somebody else is driving into it right now, and he cannot see the other side yet.

That is why I tell people what I came through.

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What stopped first

I wish I could tell you I woke up one morning under conviction and put the bottle down. That is not how it went. God convicted me through my body, which had been telling me the truth for a long time before I listened.

The hangovers stopped lasting a day and started lasting a week, sometimes two. My stomach was a mess. Heartburn. Exhausted all the time. Nights I have no recollection of, and getting told the next day what I did. Friends turning my head on a couch so I would not choke on my own vomit.

So I stopped drinking to get drunk. I did not quit drinking. A glass of bourbon with a cigar once in a great while, and that is it.

None of that happened fast. It took a long time to get to where I am now, and it still takes work. It always takes work.

Let me say the next part carefully, because it matters. I can have one. A lot of men cannot, and I am not going to pretend my line is anybody else’s. Everybody has a thing they cannot have just one of.

Mine is not alcohol anymore. Mine is peanut butter and chocolate in perfect harmony, and that slightly addictive red powder on a crunchy Flaming Hot Cheeto. I said what I said. That one is still a fight, and I lose it some weeks.

And my body tells me about that one too. Not just the weight. There are days I feel sick from it, especially when I have had too much, and I sit there knowing exactly why. Same voice, different subject. I am just as slow to listen now as I was then.

I am not proud of any of that and I am not telling it like it was a good time. I am telling it because God got me through it, and He is not finished with me.

What I did not expect was what happened next. The crowd that was built around drinking faded out. Not all at once, and nobody had a falling out. There was just nothing left to do together.

The same hours

I spend hours a day in this truck. That has not changed in years.

What changed is what fills them. There was a time those hours were worldly talk, the radio, whatever was going on with whoever. Now those same hours are worship music, sermons, devotionals, and the Bible. Same truck. Same phone. Same hours.

That is what I mean about the world changing. Nothing about my day is different. Everything about it is different.

“Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.”

Romans 12:2

Things I used to not notice

I started noticing things I never used to notice.

Long strings of cussing for no reason. Understand me, a word slips out of my mouth once in a while and I am not going to pretend otherwise. I am talking about the kind where every third word is one, where it is not even anger anymore, it is just how a man talks.

And men talking about women. Not admiring a woman. Talking about them like they are a story you tell to get a laugh out of other men.

I used to be in those conversations. I did not flinch at them. Now they make my skin crawl, and the ones having them have no idea anything changed, because nothing changed for them.

The one that got me was the men who claim it. Guys who call themselves Christians. Who quote scripture. Who will tell you what the Bible says about somebody else’s life. And in the same conversation they will tell you plainly what they are doing, with no shame in it at all, and sometimes proud of it. Not a man struggling with something and knowing he is struggling. A man celebrating the very thing he just quoted a verse about.

It was not one guy. There was one, and then there was another, and then I started seeing it in more than a few.

“Walk with the wise and become wise; associate with fools and get in trouble.”

Proverbs 13:20

One question

A man I had known most of my adult life told me something that was going on in his life.

I asked him one question about it. One. And I asked it the way I would have wanted somebody to ask me.

He never answered. We have not spoken since.

I would ask it again.

What it cost

I want to be honest about the other side of this, because I do not think you grow out of people for free.

I miss some of those guys. There were real conversations in there. Funny times. Men who would have shown up for me if I called. All of that was mixed in with everything else, and when the everything else went away, the good parts went with it.

Everything is both a blessing and a curse, and it is up to us to find the good in the bad.

And none of this means you go cut people out of your life. I am not saying walk away from anybody who is not where you are. I am saying that when you change, some of those relationships stop working on their own, and you do not always get a say in it.

The snake already grew

A snake does not shed because it decided to become something new. It sheds because it already grew. The skin comes off after the fact.

That is how this went for me. I did not decide to leave anybody. I grew, and the old skin did not fit, and it came off.

Including the serpent.

God takes people out of your life without your permission and without asking. Sometimes you find out later why. Sometimes you do not. What I know is that every man who is gone was gone for a reason, and I am not the one who decides what the reason was.

If you are walking closer to God right now and you have noticed your circle getting smaller, you are not doing it wrong.

You are just growing. And that's okay.

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Not often. He lived in Illinois and I lived in Indiana, so even then it took some planning. But once in a while we made it happen. Go shooting, hang out, sit around. We did not have to talk much. That was kind of the point.

We do not do that anymore. He is still in Illinois. I live in South Carolina now.

The door opened south

I had wanted to move south for years. My wife wanted out of the Midwest just as bad. When the door finally opened, it opened all the way. A place to live. A job for her right down the street. Things lined up in a way I could not have arranged on my own.

We picked that exact spot on the map for a reason. A few months later that reason was living in California.

So there I was. Right where God put me, for a reason that no longer existed.

What it cost

I do not have much family. My brother is the one I am close to, and we talk on the phone all the time. The relationship did not break.

What broke was the once in a while.

Nobody drives that far just to hang out for an afternoon. And there is no phone version of standing next to your brother at a range, not saying a whole lot. That is what I traded when I said yes to the door God opened. Not my brother. Just being close enough to go see him.

“The LORD had said to Abram, ‘Leave your native country, your relatives, and your father’s family, and go to the land that I will show you.’”

Genesis 12:1

Dinner in Indiana

A couple months ago we finally made it happen. It had been several years since I had seen him.

We were already headed to northwest Indiana to see my wife’s family. Seeing my brother was not the reason for the trip. It was something we had to carve out of it and work around everybody else’s plans. We have tried before. In all the time we have been down here, this was the first time it ever lined up.

Our drive up there is every bit of twelve to fourteen hours. We had already been up there a couple of days by the time we worked them into the schedule, and then there was the back and forth about where to meet and when. It was a whole thing.

He and my sister in law came over from Illinois. It should have been about a three hour drive. Between Chicago traffic and wrecks and whatever else, it took them more than six.

We met at a restaurant. Not his house. Not ours. A place in the state we both left, because that was where the two of us could reach each other.

They sat us at a table like they do any other night. We ate. We talked. For everything it took to get four people into that building, it was just dinner.

You could tell at the end. There were a lot of extra hugs in the parking lot. Nobody said out loud that it had been several years. We just hung on longer than people usually do.

Then we got in the car and drove out of northwest Indiana, back to our life in South Carolina.

Crossing the line

I lived in Illinois almost forty years. We have been in South Carolina five years now.

Coming home from a trip and crossing back into Illinois always came with a sense of dread. Crossing back into South Carolina comes with relief.

Forty years there. Five years here. This is the one that feels like home.

Still here

So that is where I am. Still driving. The reason we picked that spot is three thousand miles away, the only close family I have is four states in the other direction, and I am still right here where God put me.

“We can make our plans, but the LORD determines our steps.”

Proverbs 16:9

I would like to tell you I understand it. I do not. I just know my plan was a straight line and His was not.

A brother in Christ and I were going back and forth in a group text a while back, and one of us said it.

It is not our way, it is Yahweh.

Yahweh on the highway.

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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