He Picked Up The Coat That Fell

He thinks the good ones took it with them and he is not wrong about how it feels.

There were four of them, in his life, and now there are none.

His grandfather, who is buried up at Coldwater and who prayed out loud in a barn. A man called Dell who ran the hardware and who is the reason he knows anything at all. His aunt Ruth, who was the toughest person he ever met and who cried at almost nothing. And a preacher whose name he will not say because it still gets him.

All four are dead. The last one went in March.

And he has quietly concluded, in the way a man does at fifty-six without announcing it to anybody, that whatever those four had is gone now, and that what is left is him and a Tuesday and a kind of dutiful going-on.

He would not call it despair. He would call it being realistic about the difference between them and him.

But here is what that conclusion has cost. He has stopped expecting anything.

A man who believes the last of it is buried up at Coldwater does not go out to the river to see what the water does. He goes to work. He is decent. He waits.

So let me ask you.

What did they leave lying on the ground?

The coat came down

There is a scene in 2 Kings with a whirlwind in it and a chariot of fire, and everybody remembers those, and the part I want happens after all of that is over.

Elijah is gone. The younger man is standing on a riverbank on his own.

And here is what the text says.

He picked up the cloak that had fallen from Elijah and went back and stood on the bank of the Jordan.2 Kings 2:13

The coat fell.

Whatever else went up, the coat came down, and it came down where the younger man was standing, and he had to bend over and pick it up off the ground with his own hands.

2 Kings 2 has the older man's mantle landing on the ground beside the one who was left, and the Spirit was in that falling as much as in the whirlwind, so the conclusion that everything went with them has never once been what actually happened on that bank.

Now let me talk to you straight, since that is how you were raised and it is how I was raised too.

Your four were real. I am not going to flatten them into a lesson. Dell at the hardware was a better man than you think you are, and your aunt Ruth would have been formidable in any century.

And they are gone, and I am not going to tell you they are not, and I am not going to tell you one thing about what any of them are doing now, because that is a question people argue about and it is not mine to settle in either direction.

What I am saying is that they set things down. Everybody does. Every one of those four left things lying on the ground where you were standing.

2 Kings 2 shows a man picking up what fell rather than waiting for what went up, and the Spirit was in that plain bending down, which means the March you have been counting from was the month a coat landed at your feet.

And notice what he does next, because it is unglamorous.

He walks back to the water. The same water he had just crossed. With a coat in his hand.

He does not receive a vision. He goes back to the river and uses the thing that was left.

2 Kings 2 has him returning to the same riverbank with what he picked up, and the Spirit was in that ordinary walk back, so having nothing but what somebody left behind has never been the same as having nothing.