Two Hundred Nights in the Cab

He sleeps in a space that measures about seven feet by six. There is a bunk, a curtain, a shelf with three books and a photograph in a frame that has a crack across one corner from a hard stop in Wyoming, and a small refrigerator that hums in a key he could sing.

Two hundred nights a year, give or take. He has an apartment in a town he passes through every third week, and it has a bed in it he does not sleep well in, and a coat on a hook, and mail on the counter that is mostly for a previous tenant. When somebody asks him where he lives, he says the name of that town, and he can hear the small lie in it, and so can he.

He is fifty-one and he has been doing this for nineteen years and he is not complaining. The work is good work. He is good at it. What he cannot say to anybody, and would not know how to say if he tried, is that somewhere in the last decade he stopped feeling like a person who lives anywhere. Not lonely exactly. Something quieter than lonely. A sense of being a thing in transit, permanently, and of the transit being the whole of it.

Anybody who has spent enough nights somewhere that is not a home knows this without needing it explained. It does not require a truck. It requires only enough nights in enough places that a person stops using the word home without adding something to it. I have no word about the road ending. I would not invent one. What I have is a word about the man in the bunk.

Who is doing the keeping

Let me put a line in front of us that gets sung at funerals and almost never read carefully.

He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber.Psalm 121:3

Here is the first thing to see. The psalm is a song of ascents, which means it was sung by people who were walking. Not by people who had arrived. It is travel music. It was made for exactly the mouth of somebody who has been on a road for a long time and does not know how many more days there are.

And here is the second thing. Look at who does not sleep. Not the traveler. The Keeper. The whole comfort of that verse is that the man on the road can sleep in a cab at a rest stop because the One holding him is awake, and the holding does not stop when the man does.

You are kept, and the keeping is done by Someone who does not sleep and does not need to know your address. That is not encouragement I am adding on top of nineteen years. It is what is written in Psalm 121, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a written line and makes it a fact in a bunk behind a curtain at two in the morning. The road is provisional. The Keeper is not.

There is a third thing, and it is the one that tends to land hardest on men who have been driving a long time. The verse says the foot is not moved, and the whole psalm is about a man who is moving constantly. Those are not in tension. The psalm is not describing a stationary life. It is describing a walking life in which the walking never once became a slip.

You have walked nineteen years without slipping, and the reason is not your grip. The written word puts the keeping on the Keeper, and His Spirit is the one who makes that land in a body that has been holding its own weight for two decades.

What the town apartment was for

Now let me say the tender part, and I want to say it plainly, because the plain way is the only way a man in a cab is going to receive it.

The apartment in that town is not a failure. It is not evidence of anything wrong. A person who lives on the road keeps somewhere to put a coat and a photograph, and that is sensible, and it is also, quietly, doing a job it cannot actually do. Because the apartment is standing in for the sentence I am a person who lives somewhere, and it cannot make that sentence true, which is why saying the town's name out loud has always felt like a small lie.

You are not a man in transit who lives nowhere; you are a man kept by the One who does not sleep. Psalm 121:4 says the keeper of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps, and it is the Spirit who makes an old travel song true in a bunk behind a curtain.

Here is what I want to offer instead of the apartment, and it is not a smaller thing.

Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.Psalm 90:1

Moses wrote that, and it is worth remembering who Moses was when he wrote it: a man who had lived in a palace, then in a desert, then in a tent for forty years, and who died without ever getting an address in the land he had walked toward the whole time. And what he says is not that he is waiting for a dwelling place. He says God has been one, past tense, all along, in every generation.

You were given a dwelling place before you ever had an address, and it has been yours through every one of those nights. Psalm 90 puts the dwelling in the Lord Himself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from a page into a chest at a rest stop.

If the road ever turns dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and tell a doctor or a counselor the plain truth about the nights. Being kept by a God who does not sleep has never been a reason to sit alone with something that needs a person in the room.