Get Up and Walk · Week 2 · Friday

First Light On

He has wanted to do this for two years.

A Tuesday-night men’s group in his garage. Coffee. A few chairs. An open Bible. Real conversation between men who actually live near each other. He has thought about it, talked himself out of it, talked himself into it, and talked himself out of it again. The reasons are always the same.

I’m not a teacher. I’m not the most spiritual guy on the block. The other guys are more qualified. Nobody will come. I’ll look stupid. What if I do it once and nobody shows up the second week.

I’m not the most spiritual guy on the block.

He knows other men in the neighborhood who would do it better. He has rehearsed the names of every one of them at three in the morning. He has half-hoped one of them would start it so he could just show up. Two years has gone by. None of them did.

The Tuesday He Finally Did It

Tonight is finally Tuesday.

He sets up the chairs. Six of them, in a loose half-circle on the concrete of his garage. He puts on the coffee. He sets out a small folding table with the carafe and a stack of paper cups. He turns the overhead light on. He rolls the garage door fully up. He props the screen door open.

He sends one text to four men he knows. Garage, 7pm if you can. No pressure.

Then he sits down in the first chair. By himself. Twenty minutes before anyone might show. The old voice kicks in immediately. Nobody is coming. They are all going to drive past and not pull in. This was a stupid idea.

He stays in the chair anyway.

Biblical Backdrop

After Ehud kills Eglon, the Bible records something that often gets buried under the more dramatic earlier scene. He sounds a trumpet. He goes up into the hill country of Ephraim. And he leads.

The trumpet matters.

The Hebrew is shofar, the ram’s horn that summoned Israel for battle, for assembly, for festival, for danger. The shofar was the sound of gather. It was a single man going first. A single man saying something is starting, come if you can. And Israel came. The text is quiet about it but the implication is enormous. They came down with him. He was their leader.

What got them out of eighteen years of oppression was not just the killing of Eglon in the cool roof chamber. That was the spark. The fire was a man going up a hill, blowing a horn, and waiting to see who would come.

What Three Folding Chairs Filled

Three guys show up at his garage that night.

They sit in three of the empty chairs. They drink the coffee. One of them brought donuts. They talk for ninety minutes. Not about anything performative. Not deep theology. About work, about marriages, about how the week has been, about one guy’s dad in the hospital, about another guy’s daughter who has stopped talking to him. They pray for each other before they leave. It is the kind of awkward, real prayer that men who have not prayed out loud for each other in years pray.

One of them texts him the next morning.

I needed that. I’ll be there next week. Can I bring my brother.

Sounding a trumpet is not always sounding a trumpet. Sometimes it is turning on a light over six folding chairs and texting four men and sitting in the first chair while you wait. The first man in the room is almost always the one who thought he was not qualified.

He had been waiting two years for somebody more qualified to start the group. The thing he had spent two years calling his disqualification (I’m not the guy) was the exact thing that made the group safe for the men who actually came. They were not coming to learn from a teacher. They were coming because somebody who felt like them had finally gone first.

The thing they called your defect is the thing God will use.

A small horn. A garage door. A first chair. Set them up and sit down.

Tomorrow · Bound in the Right Hand