Counting the Ceiling Tiles

Nineteen tiles. He has known it was nineteen since a Tuesday in March six years ago, and he has recounted them every visit since, out of a sort of loyalty to the number.

The chair goes back and the light swings over and there is a hairline crack in the fourth tile from the window that has grown maybe half an inch in those six years, and he watches it the way some men watch a river. The hygienist is called Bev and she talks the entire time, which he likes, because it means he does not have to. She is telling him about her son's caravan. Something is happening with an awning. He says mm at the right places and she does not need any more than that from him and neither of them minds.

Here is the thing he has never once said out loud, not to Bev, not to anybody. This is the only room in his life where he looks up.

Everywhere else his eyes go down. Not dramatically. Nobody has ever remarked on it and nobody ever would. He looks at the counter at the feed store, at the handbrake, at his boots in the third row at church, at the two inches of tablecloth in front of his plate at his daughter's house on a Sunday. And he has an explanation ready for it, and he has believed it for a long time, and it is that he is not a man who thinks a great deal of himself, and that is probably no bad thing.

And if you have that explanation too, then I want to sit with you a minute, and I want to be clear about who I am talking to. Not, today, the one carrying a thing another person did to them. That is its own message, it is on this site, and it does not use one word of what I am about to say. Today I am talking to the man who did something, a long way back, who took it to God straight and meant every syllable, and who has spent the years since calling his own downcast eyes good manners.

Two different injuries, and only one of them ever got treated

Guilt says: I did something wrong. Shame says: I am something wrong.

They came into the house together and they use the same voice, so nobody ever separates them for you, and that is why an honest man can confess a thing properly and find that nothing lifts.

Confession is the right medicine, and it is a real one, and it worked on the thing it was made for. That account is shut. You know it is. You could tell a man the whole doctrine of it standing up in a feed store and get every word right.

But you have been taking that same medicine for the second injury for years, and it has not touched it once, and somewhere in about year three you started to work out that maybe the problem was you. It was not. It was never you. Nobody had told you there were two wounds and that is on whoever taught you, and I count myself in that.

You are cleared of every count that was ever brought, and you are not the count. That is not a friendly notion of mine. It is written that there is now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, and it is the Holy Spirit, not my sentence, who takes a settled verdict down into a body that has been braced against it for six years.

Unto thee lift I up mine eyes, O thou that dwellest in the heavens.Psalm 123:1

That is a pilgrim song. Songs of ascent, they call them, and men sang them walking uphill toward Jerusalem in a crowd, in dust, with children and animals and somebody's cousin who talked too much. Not private. Not tidy.

And read the next line of it, because the next line is the whole business. He says his eyes are on God the way a servant's eyes are on the hand of his master. That is not a man being bold. That is not a man thinking well of himself. You have been handed the exact posture a servant is supposed to hold, and lifted eyes is what it looks like. The word puts it there in plain terms, and His Spirit is the one who can make a man's neck do what his theology already agreed to.

Humility is not the same as looking at your boots

I want to be careful here, because I am not about to accuse you of anything. You have not been hiding out of pride. What happened is simpler and sadder than that.

You had a real weight, and no name for it, so you found a name that let you keep carrying it and still call yourself a Christian, and the name you found was humility. It is a good word. It is the wrong word. A servant with his eyes on the floor cannot see the hand he is meant to be watching, and a house does not run on a man like that, and neither does a kingdom.

Real humility is not thinking little of yourself. It is not thinking of yourself. And it looks up, because that is where the instructions come from.

You are watching for a hand that has never once been raised against you, and you have that word underneath you before you lift your chin an inch. Scripture says His mercy is over all His works, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the strength of your resolve, who makes a lifted head feel like obedience instead of nerve.