A Road She Has Not Been This Way Before

Ida has the car at the top of the lane with the engine off and both hands in her lap.

The map is on the passenger seat, folded wrong, the way a map goes after the second time you open it. There is a thermos wedged against it. Out through the windshield the blacktop runs down past the Coley place and disappears at the bend by the culvert, which is where her road ends and every road after it is a road she has never driven.

Forty-one years, Ray did the driving. She drove the eleven miles into town and back, and to church, and to the clinic, and that is the whole territory of her license. Ray took the wheel for anything past the county line, and she read the signs out to him and opened his crackers, and that was the arrangement, and nobody ever discussed it because there was nothing to discuss.

Ray had his stroke in February. He is at a place two counties over now, a brick building on a hill she has never seen, and there is a road that goes to it.

She got up at five. She is dressed. The car has gas in it, she checked twice. She has the directions written out on the back of an envelope in her own handwriting, and she has read them so many times in the last two days that the words have gone soft and stopped meaning anything, the way a word does if you say it forty times.

And she cannot start the engine.

It is not the bend by the culvert. She could drive to the bend by the culvert. It is that the whole route is up in her head at one time, all of it at once, like a rope in a pile: the four turns, and the highway part, and the two-lane after the highway that the envelope says is easy to miss, and the parking, and the part where she has to walk into a building full of strangers and ask somebody where he is. It is all of it, stacked in her chest, and it weighs what the whole thing weighs, and she is sitting still in a driveway at ten past six in the morning underneath the entire weight of a trip she has not taken one foot of.

A mourning dove goes off in the maple. The light is coming up gray-gold over the field behind the Coley barn.

Ida sits with both hands in her lap and thinks: I have not been this way before.

Nobody in that crossing had a map either

There is a morning in Joshua where a whole nation is standing at the edge of a river they have never crossed, and the instruction they get is stranger and kinder than people notice.

The ark of the covenant is going out first. And the officers go through the camp and tell everybody to leave a gap: about two thousand cubits, roughly a thousand yards, between themselves and the thing going in front. Far enough back that they can see it. Close enough that they can follow it.

And then the reason is given, and the reason is the whole thing.

Yet there shall be a space between you and it, about two thousand cubits by measure: come not near unto it, that ye may know the way by which ye must go: for ye have not passed this way heretofore.Joshua 3:4

That ye may know the way by which ye must go. That is how they were going to know it. Not from a map. Not from anybody's memory of a previous crossing. They were going to know the way by watching the thing out in front of them, one stretch at a time, for as long as the walking took.

You are given the same arrangement they were given. That is not a stretch, it is what is written in Joshua 3:4, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line about a river crossing and sets it down in a car in a driveway at ten past six. Nobody was handed the far bank in advance. They were handed a thing to follow and a distance to keep.

And notice the last clause, because it is spoken without one grain of blame in it. For ye have not passed this way heretofore. That is not a criticism of the people. It is God stating their situation out loud, on their behalf, as the reason the arrangement is what it is. He is not surprised that they do not know the road. The not knowing is the premise of the whole instruction.

You are not being asked to know a road you have never driven. Scripture puts that in as the reason and never once as a fault, and the same Spirit who breathed that sentence is not standing over anybody's shoulder expecting them to have this already.

The rope in a pile is not the road

Here is the thing about the whole route being in her head at once, and it is worth saying plainly, because it is doing more damage than the road is.

The route in her chest at ten past six weighs the whole trip. The road itself never weighs that, not for one second, because a road only ever arrives at the speed of a car. She will never be on all of it. She will only ever be on the piece under the wheels, which is about sixty feet long and moving.

That is not a trick of the mind or a thought to fix. It is just the difference between a rope in a pile and a rope paying out one length at a time.

You have the next bend, and that is the whole of what is being handed to you. The written word is careful about it: the manna came down for a day and the ark went ahead by a thousand yards, and the Holy Spirit does not deal in the whole rope, He deals in the length. God has never once given anybody a life's worth of strength in a driveway.

And the hour is enough of a thing to be given. It is not a small portion because it is a short one. The whole two counties happen at the width of a windshield, in order, with a mourning dove going off somewhere and the light coming up.

You are inside the only hour that God has actually handed to you. That is what is written all through the psalms, that this is the day the Lord hath made, singular, and the same Spirit who inspired that line is not asking anybody to live tomorrow's hour this morning while sitting still in a car.