I Took the Short Way Thursday

The light at Fenn and Third takes a hundred and ten seconds, and he knows that because he has sat at it four nights a week since February.

That light is where the long way begins. Right at Fenn, down past the school with the flashing sign nobody obeys, out around the reservoir where the road goes to one lane, then back in the top end of his own neighborhood from the wrong direction. Eleven minutes. Eleven extra minutes, every night, in the dark half of the year, listening to whatever came on.

The short way is straight through. Straight through goes past the row of stores with the blue awning at the end, and one of those doors is the door, and everybody reading this has a door.

He has told nobody about the long way. There is nothing to tell. He just drives.

Thursday it is raining, the fine kind that makes the wipers squeak on the low setting, and he has had the sort of day that is not dramatic and just takes everything. And he comes up to Fenn and Third, and the light goes green, and his hand does not move to the signal, and he goes straight.

That is the whole event. His hand did not move to the signal.

It is Saturday morning now and he is sitting in his own driveway with the engine off and the rain gone and the seat belt still on, having come back from getting bread, and he has been sitting there for six minutes doing the only arithmetic he knows how to do. February to Thursday. Counting the weeks. Then flattening them, because in his head Thursday did not put a dent in the count. Thursday took the count away.

That is the sentence he has been saying to himself since Friday morning, in the shower, in the parking lot at work, at the kitchen table with the bread in the bag beside him: back to zero. All of it, gone. Start again.

And he means it kindly, in a way. He is not making excuses. He is not saying it was nothing. He is doing what a serious man does, which is refuse to let himself off, and he has decided that the honest thing and the accurate thing are the same thing, and they are not.

Maybe you have a Fenn and Third. Maybe yours is a website and not a street, or a person, or a bottle in a cupboard you moved once and knew exactly where you moved it. And maybe you are sitting somewhere right now doing the same arithmetic with the same result, and it feels like integrity, and it is costing you more than the Thursday did.

The counter was never the covenant

Take the arithmetic first, because the arithmetic is doing more damage in that driveway than the drive did.

Somewhere along the way he installed a counter. Nobody handed it to him from Scripture. It came from good places, mostly, from programs that helped people and from the entirely reasonable idea that a run of clean weeks is worth something. And it is worth something. The February to Thursday months were real months. They cost him eleven minutes a night and a hundred and ten seconds at a light, and nobody but God saw a single one of them.

But a counter has one setting for a bad night, and that setting is zero. It cannot do anything else. It has no way of holding the eleven minutes and the Thursday at the same time, so it throws away the one it cannot compute.

You are held by a covenant and not by a counter, and the counter has never once been the thing keeping you. Scripture puts the keeping in God's hands, the good work begun by Him and carried on by Him, and it is His Spirit doing the carrying; the number on your own tally was never load bearing, which is why losing it does not drop the building.

Now, the other half, and it goes in the same paragraph or it becomes a lie. Thursday was real. The hand that did not move to the signal was his hand, and something in him wanted the short way, and pretending otherwise would be a worse insult than the counting. This shelf will not tell you it did not matter and will not tell you to think of it as progress in disguise.

You are able to hold both of those in one hand tonight, and you were never asked to choose between being honest and being kept. That is exactly what the written word does with a fall, and the Spirit is not embarrassed by the true version of Thursday, so nothing has to be softened for this to hold.

Read where the falling sits in the sentence

Here is the verse this whole shelf is built on, and the placement of the words is the entire point.

Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy: when I fall, I shall arise; when I sit in darkness, the LORD shall be a light unto me.Micah 7:8

Look at where the fall sits. It is in the middle of a clause. It is not the conclusion of the sentence and it is not the subject of the sentence; it is a subordinate bit on the way to the main verb, which is arise. The grammar is doing theology. A fall in this book is something that happens inside a life that is going somewhere, not a full stop that ends it.

And look who is being told to stop celebrating. Not the man. The enemy. Somebody is standing over that driveway enjoying the arithmetic, and the prophet's answer is not a defense of his own record. He does not say I have not fallen. He says do not enjoy this, because I get up.

You are a person who rises, and that is not a quality of your character, it is a statement about God. Micah 7:8 says it flatly, and the Spirit who put those words in a prophet's mouth in the worst season of his nation is the same Spirit at work in a man sitting in a driveway with a bag of bread going stale on the passenger seat.

Read the second half too, because it refuses to sweeten anything. When I sit in darkness. Not if. He does not promise himself the darkness will be short, and neither will I. What he says is who is in it with him.

Somebody else needs to know about Thursday

Say the plain thing now, because a man who tells nobody about the long way is also a man who will tell nobody about the short way.

Get a human being into this. A doctor, because what pulls a person straight through a light on a bad Thursday is very often physical as well as spiritual, and sleep and pain and what a body has come to expect are medical facts, not character flaws. A counselor, because a pattern like this has a shape that nobody can see from the driver's seat. And one friend, or a pastor, or a group, who gets the whole thing and not the summary. That is not an admission that God is not enough. Help arriving in the shape of a person is one of the ways God shows up, and going it alone was never the brave option, it was just the quiet one.

And if those six minutes in the driveway have stopped being about Thursday and turned into whether there is any reason to go on being here at all, call or text 988 before you take the bread inside, or the crisis number that answers in your own county, and get a person physically near you. Not tomorrow morning. Now.

You are not driving this stretch alone, and you were not alone on any one of those eleven minute drives nobody knew about. The word calls God near to the brokenhearted and Jesus called His Spirit the Helper, which is His line of work, and a helper who only turns up for the clean weeks would not be much of one.