Eleven Minutes in the Driveway

The engine has been off four minutes and it is still ticking.

He sits in the truck in his own driveway with the keys in his hand and does not put them in his pocket, because putting them in his pocket is a decision. October. Gravel. That gold hour where the light comes in flat under the trees and turns the neighbor's siding the color of honey and makes everything look better than it is. A kid's bike is on its side in the grass with one pedal up. The porch light comes on by itself at six twenty, and it just did.

The kitchen window is yellow. He can see his wife move past it once, carrying something, and then not come back.

Eleven minutes. Nobody has ever timed it and he knows the number exactly.

He is waiting for the thing to settle before he takes it inside. Because it goes in with him. Not his fists. Not one single thing anybody would call anybody about. It is the temperature. It is the way a question about the mail comes out of his mouth sounding like a charge being read. It is the eight seconds he lets sit before he answers his daughter, and the way she has started answering him in a smaller voice, and the fact that he first noticed that smaller voice in March and it is October.

He has prayed about it. He has read most of a book about it. He apologized in June, properly, sitting down at the table, and he meant every word, and it was three weeks before the temperature was back in the room.

The clock on the dash rolls over. Seven minutes.

Here is the part he could not explain to anybody at work. He is not looking for a program. He is not looking for a long slow season of getting better at this. There is a nine year old on the other side of that storm door who has learned to read a driveway, and the arithmetic on that is not complicated. He needs this to be different tonight.

The cab smells like sawdust and yesterday's coffee. His hands are still on the wheel at ten and two, which is a thing he only notices now, sitting still, in his own driveway, in the last of the light.

Ten minutes.

There is a driveway somewhere in your day too, and it may not have a truck in it. The bathroom with the fan running. The parking lot at the far end from the doors. The last stair, where a person stands and gets the face on before going up. Something goes through the door with you and you would give almost anything for it not to.

What comes through the door before you do

I am not going to spend three paragraphs softening this, because you did not come here to be handled.

The thing you carry in is real. It has a shape and the people in that house know its shape better than you do, and the fact that it never became anything with a police report attached does not make it nothing. You already know that. It has been in that house since March.

And I am not standing outside your driveway with a clipboard. Nobody here is scoring you and I am not about to start. What I am going to do is take the thing seriously enough to put it where it can actually be dealt with, which is the one thing eleven minutes of sitting has never once done.

You are not the first thing in that truck that God has looked straight at without flinching. Mark 1:41 has Jesus face to face with the one condition in that whole country that everybody agreed you kept at a distance, and the written account says He was moved with compassion and put out His hand, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence like that off a page and sets it down in a gravel driveway in October.

Read the order of that verse, because the order is the whole thing. The compassion moved first. The hand went out second. The man did not clean up and then get touched.

He put His hand right on the thing nobody touched

And Jesus, moved with compassion, put forth his hand, and touched him, and saith unto him, I will; be thou clean.Mark 1:41

Everything in the culture said do not do that. There was a whole body of law about distance, and it existed for good reasons, and Jesus went straight through the middle of it and put His hand on the actual place.

Notice He did not touch the man's shoulder. He did not touch a safe part. He touched the thing.

You have a Lord who goes to the place rather than to the edge of it, and He is not squeamish about your temperature at six twenty in the evening. That is what is written in the account, plainly, with no conditions attached to it, and His Spirit is the one who makes an old healing read like something happening in a driveway tonight rather than something that happened once in Galilee.

I know the objection, because I have made it myself and I have sat with a lot of men who have made it. It goes: I have brought this before. More than once. And nothing held.

So here is what I will not say to you. I will not tell you that the previous times failed because something was missing in you. That is the standard sermon on this and it is a lie, and it costs men their houses. The burden here belongs to the minister and to the Lord who does the work, and it has never once been laid on the man in the truck. When a thing has come back, the coming back is information about the depth of it, not a verdict on your sincerity.

You are known all the way down, frame and dust and temperature, by the One you are about to hand this to. Psalm 103:14 says He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, which is not an excuse being handed to you, it is the reason the reach toward you is unhurried, and His Spirit is what makes an old psalm land in a truck cab in October.

What eleven minutes cannot do, and what a phone call can

Now the plain part, and I want you to hear it as ministry rather than as a caveat.

If what you carry inside is landing on another person, then bringing somebody in is not a lesser option than prayer and it is not an admission of anything. It is God working on this through the means He usually uses. A doctor, because a body running on four hours and coffee generates a temperature all by itself, which is a medical fact and a treatable one. A counselor, because there are things a man cannot see from inside his own cab. A pastor who gets the whole account rather than the version with the corners taken off. If anyone in that house is being hurt or is frightened, do not sit on that quietly tonight; put it in front of a real person who can act. And if your own nights have started sliding toward not wanting to wake up, reach 988 before morning, or the crisis line that covers this county, rather than waiting for the porch light to come on again.

You have not been alone in this truck, and you were not alone through any of those evenings, including the ones nobody knows about. Jesus named the Spirit the Helper, and Scripture uses that name for the work He came to do, never as a compliment paid to the man in the cab, and no part of this was ever handed to you to do on your own.