He Told Me I Would Feel It

Roy Dunphy. Sixty-eight at the time, hands like a pair of work gloves left out in the weather, and one of the kindest men that county has ever produced.

He said it in the truck on the way there, which is why it landed the way it did. Not from a stage. Not with anybody listening. Just the two of them on a gravel road with the heater going and Roy driving with one wrist over the top of the wheel, and Roy said:

"Now son, I want you to know something. When you come up out of that water, you are going to feel it. You will know."

And he did not feel it.

He went under and he came up and there was water in his ears and the sound of about thirty people and the shocking cold of air on a wet head, and he waited, standing in that pond in April, actually stood there for a beat longer than he needed to, waiting.

Nothing arrived.

He got out. He smiled at the right people. Roy hugged him hard enough to hurt and said something with his voice gone, and he hugged Roy back and said "Yeah" and that was the whole of it.

That was twenty-six years ago.

Roy Dunphy died in 2019. There were four hundred people at that funeral and he was one of them, and he stood at the back with his hat in his hands and cried honestly and completely, because that man had been a father to him in about nine ways that his actual father had not managed.

And he never told him.

Not once, in twenty-six years of coffees and truck rides and one very hard week in 2011 when Roy sat in his kitchen until two in the morning. He never said: Roy, I did not feel it, and I have carried what you said in that truck like a bill I could not pay.

He is forty-nine. He believes. There is no crisis here. He gives, he prays, he is on the phone to two young men most weeks who are in the sort of trouble he was in at twenty-three.

But somewhere in him there is a sentence spoken by a good man in a warm truck, and it has been sitting there since April, unmet, and every time it comes up it brings the same conclusion with it: something did not happen to me that was supposed to.

Two things that got welded together

I want to separate two things that have been fused in you since a gravel road, and I want to do it without taking one thing away from Roy Dunphy.

The first thing is what God has promised.

The second thing is what a kind man in a truck said God would do.

Those are not the same object. They have felt like one object for twenty-six years because they arrived in the same sentence from somebody you trusted more than almost anyone, and because he was right about a great many other things, and because you were young and he was sixty-eight and he had hands like that.

But they are not the same, and while they are welded together you cannot look at either one properly.

Here is what God actually promised, and it is not small.

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.Hebrews 11:1

Look at the two nouns. Substance and evidence. Both are heavy, legal, weighing words. And look at what they are attached to: things hoped for, and things not seen.

Scripture puts the substance in faith itself, which means the writer is telling you plainly that the not-seeing is normal and is not a deficiency in the arrangement.

You have substance and you have evidence, and neither of them was ever going to arrive as a sensation in a pond in April, and that is not me letting you down easy, it is the written word, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing in the unmet place rather than in your fairly solid understanding of Hebrews.

Now let me say something about Roy, carefully, because he was a father to you in nine ways and I am not going to be clever at his expense.

Roy told you what had happened to Roy.

I would put money on it. Somewhere, decades earlier, that man came up out of water and something went through him that he never fully got over, and by sixty-eight he had told the story to himself so many times that it had stopped being his experience and become the shape of the thing. So he handed you the shape, in a truck, out of love, with the heater going.

That was not a false promise. It was a testimony wearing the clothes of a prediction, and that happens constantly among good people, and it has left a great many quiet men holding bills they cannot pay.

You do not owe that bill. The word puts your standing on faith as substance rather than on a felt confirmation, and the Spirit of God has been in you since that April doing the work whether or not He announced Himself in your nervous system.

I want to say one more thing about the funeral, because I think it matters more than the pond.

You stood at the back of a room with four hundred people in it and cried for that man honestly and completely. You are not a man who does not feel things. That is worth saying plainly, because I suspect twenty-six years of this has quietly built a theory in you about your own coldness, and the theory is contradicted by a hat in your hands at the back of a church.

And here is the last of it. You were given what was promised, in the form it was promised in. Not a sensation. Substance. Evidence. Scripture says so, the Spirit is the guarantee, and a sentence said in a truck by a man who loved you does not have the authority to add a condition God never wrote.