Nine Minutes the Long Way Round

The diversion sign is orange and it is pointing right, and by the time he has understood what right means, he is already committed to it.

Roadworks on the bypass. A man in a hard hat waving him on cheerfully, waving him onto the one road he has not driven since a Sunday two years ago. And there it is at the top of the rise, half past ten in the morning, the car park two thirds full, a folded pushchair coming out of a boot, a man in a blue anorak holding the door open with his foot and talking to somebody over his shoulder.

He is doing twenty miles an hour. His chest is doing about ninety. His hands are at ten and two and the knuckles have gone the color of the steering wheel, and he does not remember deciding to grip it.

Four streets later they come loose on their own, and the first clear thought he has is not about the building at all. It is that he is furious with his own hands.

You know this route. You know it to the minute, because you worked it out in the first month and you have driven it every Sunday since. Nine minutes. Nine minutes extra to get to your mother's, or to the shop, or to nowhere in particular, and you have never once told another living person that you do it, because saying it out loud would turn it into a thing, and you have quietly decided that it is not a thing.

Your hands are not a verdict

Let me say the plain thing first, and then show you where it comes from.

Your hands went tight because your hands were there. That is not cowardice, it is not drifting, and it is not a hole in your faith showing through. A body that has been hurt in a room keeps a map of the room, and it reads that map far faster than you can think. Yours read a car park at twenty miles an hour and had your shoulders up around your ears before your mind had finished the sentence.

That is a body doing its job. It is not a court, and it has not returned a verdict on you.

But you have been reading it as one, and that is the part that has actually been costing you. Because there is a theory about yourself that you have never written down and have never said to anybody. It goes something like this: a person who really loved God would not need to plan a route. The tightness is the proof. Whatever you tell yourself about still praying, still talking to Him out loud in the car on the way to work, the truth of you is in your knuckles.

I want that theory out of your hands, because it is not true, and because it was never yours to begin with. Somebody handed it to you.

For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.Romans 8:15

Read what you were given, and then read what you were not.

You were not given something that turns a Sunday morning into a summons. The word for what you did receive is adoption, and the sound it makes in that verse is not the sound of a defense being mounted. It is a small child's word for a father. Whatever else is true about the last two years, your standing with God is a family standing, and a family standing has never once depended on which road a person took to get home.

And notice what the verse leaves out. It does not tell you where to stand. It names no building, no seat, no hour. It tells you what you were handed and Whose you are, and it stops there, which is more restraint than most people have shown you on this subject.

Now hold that beside the other half of it.

Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.2 Corinthians 3:17

Liberty is not a direction. Read that again, slowly, because it is the whole hinge.

If the only proof that you are healed is that you walk back through a door, then that room is still holding the marking pen and you have simply moved further away while it grades you. And if the only proof that you are strong is that you never go near one again as long as you live, that same room still has both hands on your steering wheel. Freedom that can only travel one way is not freedom. It is a shorter chain, worn more comfortably.

So here is what this message is not going to do. It is not going to lean on you. If you never walk through a door like that again for the rest of your life, nothing that God says over you changes, not by a syllable, not by a comma. That is not a kindness being offered to somebody who cannot manage the real thing. It is the actual state of things, and I would write it in exactly these words if you were the only person who ever read them.

Anyone who has watched burned ground come back knows how this works. A slope that has been through fire does not return on a calendar somebody else sets for it. It comes in the order it chooses, the low green first, then the scrub, then years later the trees, and it comes back different, and it still comes back. Nobody stands on a burned slope shouting at the seed.

Your fear is ground, not a moral failing to be argued down. And the God who made both the slope and the seed has never yet been in a hurry with either.