Eleven Seconds In The Car Park

Engine off. Then there is a pause.

You have never timed it but it is about eleven seconds, and in those eleven seconds something happens to your face. It comes up. It arrives from somewhere, and it is warm and open and it is genuinely yours, and by the time you have the door handle in your hand it is fully on.

Then you get out and you are the person everybody in that building knows.

They are not wrong about that person. That is what makes this so hard to explain to anybody. She is not a fabrication. She is a version of you that is real, and she is kind, and she is the one who remembers birthdays, and about seventy percent of the time she is simply what you actually are.

The other thirty percent she is assembled in a car park in eleven seconds.

You noticed it in about the fourth year and thought nothing of it. It is the sort of thing everybody does. You have been doing it now for nine.

And here is what has changed and what you cannot get past.

Two months ago you had a genuinely bad morning, the kind that takes your legs, and you sat in that car park and the eleven seconds happened anyway.

Automatically. Without permission. You watched it come up over the top of something that was still going on underneath, and you got out of the car, and you were fine all morning, and you drove home and cried in the drive.

You are no longer able to arrive as what you are, because the machinery does it for you now, and it does not ask.

God opens a conversation in the middle of a mess

There is a verse that gets quoted on its own so often that people forget what it is sitting in the middle of, and the context is the whole of its power.

Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.Isaiah 1:18

Read what is happening in the chapter around it. The first seventeen verses are as unsparing as anything in the book. The nation's religious life is described as something God has stopped being able to stand. There is nothing tidy anywhere near this verse.

And in the middle of that, He says: come now, and let us reason together.

Come now. Not come when. Not come once. Now, in the state described in verses one to seventeen, and let us talk.

So take this now, in the car park, before the eleven seconds. You are invited into the conversation in exactly the state you are in. That is what is written into the position of that verse, and the Holy Spirit is the one who issues that invitation, and He has never once asked anybody to arrive composed.

Read it again and notice something else. He does not say let us reason together after you have sorted the scarlet. The whitening is what the conversation is for.

The face is not a lie and it has stopped being yours

Now let me hold both halves of this, because you have been quietly accusing yourself of hypocrisy for two months and it is not accurate and it is not helping.

The warmth is real. Seventy percent of the time it is simply you, and the thirty percent is not a mask over something cold, it is a real capacity being called up early by a person who has learned that arriving warm is safer.

That is not hypocrisy. It is a skill, and you built it, and it has served you and it has served other people.

The problem is not that it exists. The problem is that it has become involuntary, and a thing that happens without your permission is no longer a tool, it is a governor.

And you found that out two months ago when it came up over the top of something you actually needed to be able to carry into a room.

You are received unassembled. His word puts the invitation in the middle of the chapter rather than at the end of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says come now, and there is not one condition attached anywhere in the verse.

The plain hall and the door with no toll on it

In 1895 a man named Phineas Bresee opened a hall near the middle of Los Angeles and made a rule about it that everybody still repeats: not a single seat could be rented.

The money was the visible half. The invisible half is what actually changed people, and it is this: nothing had to be arranged at that door.

In most rooms there is a toll, and it is almost never money now. It is composure. Everybody knows the currency of their own building and pays it in the car park, and nobody has ever announced it and nobody could name it if you asked.

That hall was full of people who came in off the street in whatever state the day had left them, and the reason it worked is that once you have a room where a few people arrive undone, everybody else can stop paying. The written word settled that, and His Spirit has been carrying it ever since.

Somebody has to be first. In your building, given who you are and how long you have been there, it is probably you.

The written word says come now in the middle of the mess, and the Holy Spirit is the one who opens that door.