The Morning the Engine Stayed Off

The heater ticks as it cools. That is the only sound in the car, and it turns out to be the sound he remembers longest, because it is what a thing sounds like once it has stopped.

He is parked third from the wall, where the drain is, in the space he has used for nine years without ever once deciding to use it. There is a tin of flapjacks on the passenger seat, still warm through the lid, because he made them the night before for the tea rota the way he always does. The clock on the dashboard says 10:52. Through the windscreen he can see the side door propped open with a fire extinguisher, and the last few going in, and a man in a good coat holding the door and glancing at his watch.

He has both hands on the wheel. He is not crying and he is not angry. He is simply not moving, and he could not tell anybody why, including himself, and that is the part that frightens him. If there were a reason he could say out loud, he would say it. There is only a weight laid flat across the chest and a body that will not stand up.

At 11:04 he starts the engine again and drives home. He puts the tin on the kitchen counter and it sits there for four days, and every time he passes it he thinks the same three words, and the words are what have I done.

That was you, or something near enough. Maybe it was not a car park. Maybe it was a phone in your hand and a message you never answered, or a coat you put on and took off again in the hallway. But you know the hour I mean. It is the hour you have been on trial for ever since.

What was written down that morning

Let me say the weight plainly, because it has been sitting underneath a great many other words.

You believe there is a verdict. Not a mood, a verdict: a finding, entered somewhere, on a record, about the sort of person who sits outside at ten to eleven and drives home again. And the hardest part of it is that you served as the clerk of that court yourself. Nobody needed to write anything over that morning. You wrote it, in your own hand, and kept reading it back every week as though it had come down from somewhere higher up.

So let us go and look at what is actually written, because there is a record, and it is not the one you have been reading.

You have a record in God's own keeping, and it is not the one you have been reading back to yourself on Sunday nights. That is not a kindness I have invented for a man in a car park. It is written down, it has been written down for three thousand years, and the Holy Spirit has brought you to this page to hear it read out.

There is a psalm written by a man who was nowhere he was supposed to be. He is out of the city, out of the assembly, hunted, sleeping rough, and among the last people anyone that year would have described as being where God wanted him. Out of that, he writes this:

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?Psalm 56:8

Read the first clause slowly, because it does not say the thing your eye expects it to say.

Thou tellest my wanderings. Tellest is a counting word, the way a man tells coins or tells sheep through a gate. God is keeping count of the wandering. He is not looking away from it and He is not pretending it is not happening. Every mile of it is numbered.

Now hold the second clause against the first, because that is where the floor gives way. What He puts in the book beside the wandering is not a charge. It is the crying. He counts the wandering, and He keeps the tears, and the keeping of the tears is the only comment He makes on the counting.

You are seen at what that morning cost you, and you are not reduced anywhere in heaven to the bare fact that you drove away. The written word has Him counting the wandering and bottling the tears in the same breath, which means He kept the hour whole rather than summarizing it. The Holy Spirit is not flattening that morning into a finding, and He never was.

That is the whole of what I have to hand you, and it is enough. The Keeper of the record was in that car park at ten to eleven. He was not at the door with a clipboard, taking names, marking who came. He was in the seat beside you, with the tin between the two of you, keeping careful count of the hardest hour you had had in nine years, and what He wrote down next to it was what it cost you.

And notice what the psalm is actually doing, because this part matters for what comes next. It is not a man asking God to start paying attention. It is a man saying out loud, in the open, what God is already doing. Are they not in thy book. He is not informing heaven. He agrees with it, audibly, in a cave, with nobody there to hear him but the One he agrees with.

That is what a declaration is. It is not a technique and it is not leverage. It is a person standing on what God has already said and saying it back to Him, out loud, where their own ears can hear it. And you have every right to do it, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and that standing was not issued to you by a room and cannot be withdrawn by one.

You have a voice that can agree with the record God actually keeps, out loud, in place of the sentence fear supplied and you have been reciting. There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Holy Spirit steadies that agreement in you without ever making the force of your voice the price of the freedom. A shaky voice agrees just as truly as a strong one. David's was not steady in that cave either.

He never asked David for a statement of reasons. He is not asking you for one either.