Fifty Minutes in the Parked Car

The engine had been off for nearly an hour and the metal had stopped ticking a long time ago.

Dean sat in the driver's seat with his seat belt still on and the keys in his right hand, resting on his thigh, the way you hold keys when you are about to get out. He had been holding them like that since twenty past four.

The house was eleven steps away. He could see the front door from where he was sitting. He could see the hedge that needed doing, and the recycling bin that had blown over again, and the upstairs window where the curtain never sits right, and the light going gold on the brickwork the way it does at this hour in September.

Inside there was nothing wrong. That was the strange part and it was the part he could not explain to anybody. Nobody was shouting. Nobody was ill. Kayla would be at the table doing homework and complaining about doing homework. There would be something on in the kitchen. Someone would say, all right, and he would say, all right, and that would be it.

Eleven steps.

He had driven home. Forty minutes on the highway, two junctions, the turn by the gas station, all of it, without a single problem. He had indicated. He had parked properly, straight, between the lines of nothing at all. Every part of the machinery had worked right up until the moment the engine went quiet, and then it had simply stopped working, all at once, like a fuse going.

He turned the keys over in his hand. He looked at the door.

At half past four he told himself, in five minutes. At twenty to five he told himself the same thing and did not notice he was repeating it. At ten to he stopped telling himself anything and just sat.

A woman went past with a dog and did not look in. Two kids went past on bikes. The sun came round enough to be in his eyes and he did not put the visor down.

He was not crying. He wants that understood. He was not sitting in a car crying, which is at least a thing you could point at and name. He was just sitting, entirely calm, with a very quiet voice underneath everything saying the same short sentence over and over, and the sentence was: what is wrong with me.

That is the one that does the damage. Not the tiredness. The verdict that arrives with it.

Because a man who cannot get out of a car outside his own house at twenty to five on a Tuesday, with nothing wrong inside and everybody fine, has generally already decided what that says about him. He decided it on the third afternoon, when he realized it had happened before. And he has not told a single person, because the sentence sounds ridiculous out loud, and because he suspects he already knows what the answer is.

Fifty minutes. Keys in his hand. Eleven steps.

Fifty minutes is not a verdict

I am not going to ask you to go in.

That needs saying first, before anything else, because you have probably already braced for it. You have got fairly good at spotting the shape of a paragraph that is about to turn into a nudge, and there is no nudge here. Nobody is timing you. There is no small step being suggested and no reframe waiting at the end of this. You can sit in the car for the whole of this message and it will have gone exactly as it should.

What I want to do instead is much smaller and, I think, much more use.

I want to disagree with the sentence.

The sentence is: what is wrong with me. And underneath it, doing the actual harm, is the conclusion you came to on the third afternoon, which is that this is information about your character. That you have gone soft. That other men park and get out. That whatever it was that used to carry you through the door has been withdrawn, and the withdrawing must mean something about you.

You are not looking at evidence about your character in that windshield, and you were never the one holding yourself together in the first place. That is not me being kind about it. Psalm 40 is written by a man who says plainly that he was in a pit and in the clay and that somebody else came and got him out, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line like that and lays it over a man in a parked car at twenty to five.

He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.Psalm 40:2

He came down into the clay

Read what David does in that verse, because it is almost nothing.

He is in the pit. He is in the clay. And then he is on rock, and his goings are established, and every single active verb in the sentence belongs to God. Brought me up. Set my feet. Established my goings. There is no verb in there where the man in the clay climbs, reaches, decides, rallies, or has a better attitude about the clay. He is in it, and then he is out, and the difference between those two states is entirely somebody else's doing.

That is not a small point of grammar. That is the whole thing.

Because the picture you have been carrying is that the strength arrives when you generate the movement, so no movement means no strength, and no strength means you have failed at something invisible. And the psalm reverses it completely. The movement is what happens after God gets underneath you. Not before, as a qualification.

You have a God who comes down into the clay rather than calling instructions from the top of the pit. Scripture puts every verb of that rescue on Him, and His Spirit is the One who does the coming down, in a car, on a Tuesday, without anybody hearing about it.

And while we are here, one plain thing, said warmly and then left alone. If this has been most afternoons for weeks rather than this one afternoon, please tell your doctor. That is not a spiritual failure and going is not a retreat, and God is not more pleased with a man who sits in a car alone than with a man who books an appointment. Both of those are Tuesday. Both of those are fine.

You were met in the car before you noticed anybody was there. The written word says He brought me up, which is a thing done to a person and not by them, and the Holy Spirit does not wait at the front door for you to arrive under your own power.