Back when I ran a CB, I would key up and ask for a radio check.
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.