The Man I Am In The Car

Eleven minutes. He has timed it, which tells you something about him.

The school run is eleven minutes in the morning and about fourteen coming back, and it is in those eleven minutes, alone, that a man arrives who nobody in his life has ever met.

He says things out loud. Not shouting exactly, and never anything he would want written down, and always at people who cannot hear him: the van that pulls out, the woman at the mini roundabout who does not go, the cyclist who is entitled to be there and whom he knows perfectly well is entitled to be there.

Then he parks. And he is out of the car and he is himself again in about four seconds, and he says good morning to a man he likes, and the whole thing folds away so completely that by the time he is at his desk he could not tell you what he said.

Nobody has ever seen it. That is the point of it, and it is also the thing that has started to bother him.

His wife has never seen it. His three children have never seen it, because it does not happen when they are in the car, and that is not restraint, it genuinely does not happen. His parents, his brother, the eleven men in the group he has been part of for six years, none of them.

He is forty-two and he has been doing this since he was about twenty-six, and for most of that time he filed it under nothing much. A release valve. Traffic. Everybody does it.

Then, last October, he was on the phone in the kitchen on hands-free while reversing off the drive, and he said something to a car, quite badly, and the phone was live, and his brother heard it.

His brother said, "Whoa," and laughed, and said, "who was that," and they moved on within about eight seconds, and neither of them has ever mentioned it again.

He has thought about it approximately every day since.

Because what came back to him, in the four seconds after his brother laughed, was not embarrassment. It was a much older thought, and it arrived fully formed, and it was: that is the actual one, and the rest is management.

Which one is the actual one

I want to go straight at that sentence, because it is the whole of this and everything else on this page is in service of it.

That is the actual one, and the rest is management.

That thought has an ancient pedigree and it is one of the most effective things ever whispered at a decent man. It says: the private version is the real version, and everything witnessed is performance. It is effective because it wears the clothes of honesty, and an honest man will always give honesty a hearing.

It is not honesty. It is an accusation with a very good tailor.

And it is not what God says about where you are.

As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.Psalm 103:12

That is a deliberately chosen measurement. North and south have poles: go far enough north and you start going south, and there is a limit built into the axis. East and west have no such thing. You can travel east forever and never once begin going west.

David reaches for the one direction in creation with no meeting point, and says that is the distance.

You have had your transgressions removed from you by that distance, and that is not my comfort for a man in traffic, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing on the October thought rather than on your general belief in forgiveness.

Now let me say something specific about the eleven minutes, because I am not going to pretend they do not matter.

They matter. A man is not two men, and the fact that a room does not see something does not make it less his. I am not going to hand you the release-valve theory back, because you stopped believing it in October and you were right to.

But matters and is the actual one are two completely different claims, and the second one is a lie.

You are the man who says good morning in the parking lot, and you are the same man who was in the car, and both are the man God has already dealt with. Scripture puts the removal at the distance between east and west, and the Spirit of God has been in you through sixteen years of school runs, and He is not filing a separate report on the version of you that nobody meets.

I want to say something about the eight seconds with your brother, too.

He laughed and said "who was that" and you have thought about it every day since. You have been convicted about something quietly, for months, without anybody making you, and that is not shame doing its work. That is the Spirit doing His, and He works like that: gently, persistently, without an audience, on a man who is already forgiven and is therefore safe enough to be shown something.

And here is the last of it. You are not managing a real man with a fake one. The word says the transgressions were removed as far as east is from west, and the Spirit is the seal, and the version of you in the car is not a truer self hiding behind a decent one. It is an old habit in an enclosed space, and it has been separated from you by a distance that has no meeting point.