The Walk From The Car

Dale has been sitting in his own car outside his own house for eleven minutes, and the engine has been off for nine of them.

The lights are on in there. He can see the shape of somebody moving past the front window and he knows exactly who it is by the height of them. It is not late. There is food happening; he can tell by the way the kitchen light is doing what it does.

It is twenty-two steps from where he is parked to that door. He has done it thousands of times, in the dark, drunk with tiredness, carrying things in both arms, and it has never once been a distance.

Tonight it is a distance.

He is not going to be shouted at. Let me get that out of the way now, because it is not what is happening. Nobody in that house is going to raise their voice. There will not be a scene, and if he told them at the door there would be, at worst, a silence and then somebody putting the kettle on, which is somehow the part he cannot face.

It is gone. That is all. Whatever it was, and I am not going to describe it because yours is different and I do not want you comparing, it is gone, and there is nothing in his hands, and every single one of the things he had been going to do with it is now not going to happen.

And the walk is twenty-two steps.

Now, I want to say the necessary thing straight away, because a message like this can do damage in the first three paragraphs.

I am not going to ask you how it happened. Not once, anywhere on this page. I do not know whether you were reckless or unlucky or steady and ambushed, and it is not my business and it changes nothing about what I have to say to you. There is no version of this article where you have to account for anything before you are allowed to keep reading.

And nobody is going to tell you this is God teaching you something. Not here. I do not know that, nobody knows that, and people who say it at moments like this are guessing out loud at somebody else's expense.

What I know is what the walk feels like, and that is enough to be going on with.

You have your own version. There is a door, and a distance, and people on the other side of it who are going to have to be told, and you have been sitting outside your own life for longer than the engine has been off.

Nobody here is auditing anything. You are just in the car.

The father was already looking down the road

There is a story everybody has heard, and almost everybody remembers the wrong detail from it.

And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.Luke 15:20

When he was yet a great way off.

That is not a detail about eyesight. A man does not see somebody a great way off unless he has been watching that road, and the story does not say for how long, and the not saying is the point. The father was already out. He was already looking. The son did not summon him by arriving.

And then he ran, which is the part the original hearers would have found undignified for a man of that age and standing, and it happens before a word is spoken. Before the speech. Before the explanation. Before any account of what had happened to the money.

There is no audit anywhere in that story. Read it again if you have always assumed there was. Nobody asks him a single question about the far country.

And now hear what is already true over you, sitting where you are sitting. You are seen a great way off. That is not my encouragement: the written word puts the seeing before the arriving, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man in a car with the engine cooling.

And the running has already started. Not once you are inside and not once you have explained: the word says he ran while the son was still down the road, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a present fact rather than a story about somebody else's family.

Your welcome was never priced

Here is the thing this whole site exists to say, and it belongs right here.

Nothing about how you are received depends on what is in your hands.

That is not a comfort I have invented to make a hard evening easier. It is the plain arrangement. The word says by grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast. Every phrase in that sentence is closing a door on the idea that anybody's welcome has ever had a figure attached to it.

So your standing has not moved. Not down and not up: it did not go up in the good year and it has not gone down in this one, and it is the Spirit who bears witness with your spirit that you are a child of God, which is a sentence about parentage and not about performance.

And hear this too, because it is the other half and half of us need it more. Nothing about your worth was ever attached to what you were carrying. The word says God is no respecter of persons, and the Spirit is the one who makes that specific enough to reach a man who has just lost the exact thing he had quietly been using to justify his place at his own table.

You did not have more standing in the good year. You only felt like you did.