I Sit In The Parking Lot

Second row from the back, on the left, under the tree that drops something sticky in July.

He gets there at four minutes past ten, which is late enough that the doors are shut and the singing has started and nobody is standing outside greeting anybody. He turns the engine off. He can hear it, faintly, through a wall, which is enough to tell you what they are on but not enough to make out words.

At eleven fifteen or thereabouts the doors go and people come out in ones and twos and then all at once, and he waits until it has thinned, and then he starts the engine and goes home and gets the lunch on.

Nineteen weeks.

He has told nobody. His wife thinks he goes. She asks him what it was about and he says something general and true, because he can hear enough to know roughly, and because the answer she is expecting is a shrug and a word.

The first week was an accident. He had genuinely meant to go in, and there was a thing with the car and he arrived late and he could not face walking into a room that was already singing.

The second week was not an accident, and neither was any of the seventeen after it.

He is sixty-one, and there is a specific thing he is waiting for before he opens the door, and he has never put it into words until now, and it is this: he is waiting to feel like a man who is allowed in.

Not forgiven. He would say, if you asked him theologically, that he is forgiven, and he would say it the way a man says a thing he has believed for forty years. Allowed in is different. Allowed in is about a room with people in it who think a certain thing about him, and about what he did, and about whether a man carries that up a path in front of them.

Who is already outside

Let me start with what is actually happening at four minutes past ten every week, because I do not think anybody has said it to you plainly.

You are arriving.

Nineteen weeks. In weather. Choosing to be there, on time enough to hear it through a wall, on the same left-hand side under the same sticky tree. That is not avoidance and it is not hypocrisy, and I would be careful about letting anybody, including yourself, use either of those words about a man who has driven to the same place nineteen times.

Something has been getting you into that car. It has never once been indifference.

Now here is what Scripture says about the distance you are working with.

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

I want you to look at where the father is when he sees him, because everybody remembers the running and almost nobody remembers this: the father is close enough to the road to see a figure at that distance, which means he was not indoors.

And the son has not arrived. He is a great way off. He has not said his speech, which he has been rehearsing the entire journey, and which he does eventually get out and which his father talks over.

The compassion happens at distance. The running happens at distance. Everything decisive in that story is done before the boy is anywhere near the house.

You are seen from a long way off and the running has already started, and that is not encouragement for a man in a parking lot, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing on the nineteen weeks rather than on a parable you have known since you were a boy.

Now let me say something about allowed in, because you named it exactly and that deserves a real answer.

You separated forgiven from allowed in, and you were right to, because they are two different things and most people blur them. Forgiven is what God has done. Allowed in, as you are using it, is a social fact about a room and about what people think.

And here is the honest part: I cannot tell you what people in that room think. I have never met them and neither has anybody else writing to you from a distance, and a man who promises you a warm welcome from a congregation he has never seen is selling you something.

What I can tell you is what has already been settled, and where.

You are received by God at the distance you are currently standing at, and the word puts the compassion and the running before the arrival, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been getting a sixty-one-year-old man into a car nineteen weeks running to sit under a tree and listen through a wall.

I want to say one more thing about the speech.

The son had one prepared. He had worked on it. And his father let him get about half of it out and then interrupted him with instructions about a robe, and the boy never did deliver the part where he asks to be treated as a hired man, because the father was not conducting that kind of conversation.

You have a version of that speech and you have been polishing it in a parking lot for nineteen weeks. Scripture says the father ran before a word of it was said, and the Spirit is the seal on that, and God is not waiting to hear whether you can make the case.

And if what is on you is heavier than this, if it has got as far as not wanting to be here at all, please tell one human being today. A doctor, a crisis line in your own country, one person who can sit with you. That is not a detour from any of this. It is part of it, and you are worth the phone call.

You are seen from a long way off, and the running started before a word of the speech was said. Scripture puts the compassion at the distance rather than at the door, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has got you into that car nineteen weeks running.