The Town That Knows

Nine hundred and four people live in the town where Wade was born, and every one of them over the age of about fourteen knows.

Nobody has ever said a word to him about it. Not once, in two and a half years. Not the man at the counter, not the woman who runs the post office out of the back of the hardware store, not either of the pastors, not his own cousin.

There was one moment, about a week after, in the feed store. He came in and there were four men at the front and the talk stopped for maybe a second and a half and then started again about something completely different. Nobody looked at him wrong. One of them said hey Wade. And the conversation carried on and Wade got what he came for and left.

That second and a half is two and a half years old and he can still hear it.

Here is what a small town actually does, and people who have only lived in cities do not believe it.

It absorbs. It does not confront and it does not exile. It folds a thing in and carries it, permanently, without discussion, and it goes on being perfectly decent to your face forever. Nobody freezes you out. You are invited to everything. You are on the list for the fair and somebody will still stop to help you if your truck will not start in January.

And the thing is simply always there, in the room, unmentioned, and you are the only person for whom it is the loudest object present.

There is one more thing and it needs saying because leaving it out would make this a smaller and less honest message.

Two of those nine hundred and four were hurt directly. They still live here. They shop where he shops. They have been unfailingly civil and they did not have to be, and whatever they carry is theirs, and nothing on this page is asking them to put it down or hurry up.

And this is where I stop writing about Wade, because you live somewhere.

Maybe a town, maybe a trade, maybe a family. Somewhere everybody knows and nobody says. I am not going to ask what happened, and I am not going to tell you the room owed you a different second and a half.

Somebody lifts your head

I want to give you a verse a man wrote while running from his own son, in the worst public collapse of his entire life, when the whole nation knew and the whole nation was talking.

But thou, O LORD, art a shield for me; my glory, and the lifter up of mine head.Psalm 3:3

Three things in that line and the third one is the one for a small town.

A shield: something between him and what is coming at him. His glory: the same word as weight and standing, kept in God rather than in public opinion. And then, the lifter up of mine head.

Sit with that last image, because it is a physical description of exactly what happens to a person in a place where everybody knows.

A head goes down. Not dramatically. Two degrees. A man goes into the feed store and his chin drops two degrees and he gets what he came for and leaves, and after two and a half years the neck has learned it without being taught.

And David does not say: lift up your head. He says God is the one who does the lifting. It is not a command aimed at the man on the floor. It is a job description, and the job belongs to somebody else, and it always did.

So take that in the doorway of the feed store. You are not the one responsible for getting your own head up, and Psalm 3:3 says the Lord is the lifter of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing that work in you right now, today, in a town that has never once mentioned it.

Now hold the second thing at the same time. Psalm 3 does not say the nation was wrong to know what David had done. It does not campaign for his reputation and it does not put him in the right. It states where he is held while the whole of it is public and unresolved, and the written word is content to leave the rest with God, and His Spirit does not confuse the two.