So then, let us not be like others, who are asleep, but let us be awake and sober.
1 Thessalonians 5:6 (NIV)
Let Us Be Awake
The hives sit on the grass strip between a soybean field and a drainage ditch, and they have to be off it before the co-op sprays the section. Gil keeps them, sixty-one and retired out of a machine shop, and his shoulder is done. The man who came to help runs a crew that puts in septic systems, can read the fall of a field by eye, and has never worn a veil.
“We take the back two first,” he says. “We don’t set anything down on the grass.” That’s how he talks all morning, putting himself into every order he gives, and it works on the septic man like a slow itch, because on his own crew he’s the one who knows things.
On the fourth hive the septic man gets out ahead of him. He tips the box up onto his thigh to get a hand under it, the bottom board comes away, a frame goes down into the grass, and the pitch of the whole strip changes. Gil has no gloves on because he’s been working the smoker. He takes eight or nine on the wrist and two on the cheek before the veil comes down. Without raising his voice a half step he tells the septic man to walk out toward the ditch and not to swing at anything.
“So then, let us not be like others, who are asleep, but let us be awake and sober.” Paul says let us, and he means himself. We do not belong to the night or to the darkness, he says, and then the armor, faith and love as a breastplate and the hope of salvation as a helmet, and he’s asking for all of it on his own account too.
Gil’s wrist is already swelling into the watch band. The septic man comes up out of the ditch with two welts on his neck and doesn’t say he’s sorry. They strap the last two hives and lift them onto the truck, and Gil does his half one-handed and says we the entire time. How many of those stings were Gil’s to take?
A Prayer to Remember
Keep me out of the sleep that looks exactly like ordinary life, Lord. Wake me at the hour it’s needed and not an hour early. Put me near people who say we when they tell me what to do, and when it’s my turn to say a hard thing to somebody, let it cost me first.
In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.
