khad.com

Convenience Stores

by Buddy Wakefield

We both know the smell of a convenience store at 4 AM like the backs of a lot of hands. She sells me trucker crack: Mini-Thins, like Vivarin. Doesn’t make me feel awkward about it.

She can tell it’s been a long drive, and it’s only gonna get longer. Offers me a free cup of coffee, but I never touch the stuff. Besides, I’m gonna need more speed than that.

We notice each other’s smiles immediately. It’s our favorite thing for people to notice: our smiles. It’s all either one of us has to offer. You can see it in the way our cheeks stretch out like arms wanting nothing more than to say “You, are welcome here.”

She shows brittle nicotine teeth with spaces between each one. Her fingers are bony. No rings. And she’d love to get her nails done someday. One time she had her hair fixed. They took out the grease, made it real big on top, and feathered it. She likes it like that.

She will never be fully informed on some things just like I will never understand who really buys Moon Pies, or those rolling, wrinkled, dried-up sausages, but then again, she’s been here a lot longer than me. She’s seen everything from men who grow dread locks out of their top lips to children who look like cigarettes.

I give her my money. I wait for my change. But I feel like there’s something more happening here.

I feel like a warm mop bucket and dingy tiles that’ll never come clean. I feel like these freezers cannot be restocked often enough. I feel like trash cans of candy wrappers with soda pop dripping down the wrong side of the plastic. I feel like everything just got computerized.

I feel like she was raised to say a lot of stupid things about a color, and I feel like if I were to identify myself as gay, this conversation would stop.

It’s what I do.

I feel.

I get scared sometimes.

And I drive.

But in one minute and fourty-eight seconds I’m gonna walk outta here with a full tank of gas, a bottle of Mini-Thins, and a pint of milk while there’s a woman trapped behind a formica counter somewhere in North Dakota who wants nothing more than to hear my whole story. All 92,775 miles of it. I can tell, though, she’s heard more opinions and trucker small talk than Santa Claus has made kids happy, so I only find the nerve to tell her the good parts; that she’s the kindest thing to happen since Burlington, Vermont, and I wanna leave it at that. Because men — who are not smart — have taken it farther, have cradled her up like a nutcracker and made her feel as warm as a high school education on the dusty backroad, or a beer in a coozy.

I feel like she’s been waiting here a long time for the one who will come two-stepping through that door on eighteen wheels without makin her feel like it’s her job to sweep up the nutshells alone when she’s done been cracked again. A man who won’t tempt her to suck the wedding ring off his … , but will show her, simply, love.

She doesn’t need me or any other man, but she doesn’t know that either, and I’m just hoping like crazy she doesn’t think I’m the one because the only time I’ll ever see North Dakota again is in a Van Morrison song late, late at night.

I promise.

Y’all, I feel like she’s thirty-seven years old wearing fifty-one — badly — dying inside (like certain kinds of dances around fires) to speak through you, a forest, if you weren’t so taken with sparks. But she wasn’t given those words. She has not been told that she can definitely change the world. She knows some folks do, but not in convenience stores and not with lottery tickets.

So I finally ask her what I been feeling the entire time I’ve been standing there still getting scared like I do sometimes — really, really ready to drive. I ask, “Is this it for you? Is this all you’ll ever do?”

Her smile. Collapsed.

That tightly strapped-in pasty skin went loose.

Her heart. Fell crooked.

She said, not knowing my real name, “I can tell, buddy, by the Mini-Thins and the way you drive that we’re both taken with novelty. We’ve both believed in mean gods. We both spend our money on things that break too easily. Like people. And I can tell that you think you’ve had it rough, so especially you should know. It’s what I do. I dream. I get high sometimes. And I’m gonna roll outta here one day. I just might not get to drive.”

Why Won't My Law Work Anymore?

Jesus is the ultimate outlaw. He “broke” the Law once for all.

After someone quoted Matthew 5:17 (in the King’s English, no less) in response to that, I thought I should clarify.

A better translation of that verse would be, “Don’t misunderstand why I have come. I did not come to abolish the law of Moses or the writings of the prophets. No, I came to accomplish their purpose.”

From the perspective of the Pharisees and other religious leaders (i.e.: legalists) Christ definitely “broke” our precious Law. That system was broken already since, as Paul tells us in Galatians, no one can ever be made right with God by keeping the Law. (Galatians 2:16)

As Luther states in his commentary on that very epistle, even if we could possibly keep the Law with total perfection, that would still not save us, for that is not the function of the Law.

Only Christ can save us.

In this sense, it may be clearer to some to say that Christ did not “break” the Law but broke, rather, our sad attempts to prop it up under the weight of our horrible use of it.

Christ broke the Law as it was being used to achieve even a shred of justification, sanctification, or even a closer everyday experience with God. It simply cannot do any of those things. From the perspective of the legalist, that looks like the Law, which seemed so functional before, is very broken indeed.

“Why won’t my Law work anymore?” we ask while shaking it and holding up to the ear. “Who broke my Law?”

For that purpose, it never was working.