Three Sundays In The Car Park

There is a space at the far end where the fence meets the hedge, and if you park nose in you can see the doors without anybody seeing you.

Renée has used it three Sundays running.

The first Sunday she sat there for forty minutes and told herself she was early. The second Sunday she brought a coffee, which is what a person does when they are planning to sit somewhere. The third Sunday she did not bother with the story. She drove in, parked nose in, and watched Deacon Willis prop the door with the same doorstop he has used since 2011, and then she watched the whole congregation go in a family at a time, and then she drove home.

It is Sunday again.

She is in her own kitchen at twenty past eight with a cup of coffee she is not drinking, and the dress is on the back of the chair, and everything about her body already knows how this goes.

She is not staying away because they would be hard on her. That is the thing she wishes somebody understood. They would be soft. That is the problem. Sister Antoine would take her face in both hands. Somebody would say we been praying for you with the emphasis on the been, and it would be true.

And she cannot survive being met like that with what she is currently carrying, so she sits at the fence.

Three weeks turns into four the way water finds a crack. Nobody decides on four. Four just arrives, and then you start doing the sum about how many weeks a person can be gone before the going back becomes its own event, and that sum only ever runs one direction.

And this is where I stop talking about Renée, because you know which parking space is yours, and you have run that sum this week.

Let me name it before I do anything else: it is not the building you cannot face. It is the kindness. You have decided in advance that you will not survive being loved on a week like this one, and so you are sitting in a car in a coat, out of range.

You have the right to walk in

Let me say the strongest thing first, because in about an hour you are going to make a decision at a fence.

You have the right of approach. Right now, this morning, with everything you are carrying and nothing resolved. Not a hope of approach. A right, held and exercised, and it does not thin out with the number of weeks you have been gone.

And I am not the one who granted that, which is precisely why nothing you did last week can revoke it. It is written down, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it into a kitchen at twenty past eight:

Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.Hebrews 4:16

Look at the word boldly, and then look at where you are being invited to be bold. Not at a side door. At a throne. And look at what is on offer when you get there: mercy, which is only ever needed by people who have something to need mercy about, and grace in time of need, which means the time to come is the time you are least presentable, not the time you have tidied up. And it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in you rather than merely read well.

So you are welcome this morning at the highest place there is, and Scripture is where I get that rather than my own warmth, and God's Spirit has been in that car with you all three Sundays.

Being loved is not a debt

Now the fear, and I am going to say it the way it actually sits in you, because a general word will not move it.

You are not afraid of judgment. You are afraid of Sister Antoine taking your face in both hands. You are afraid of being handed something you have privately decided you have no way to pay for, and that arithmetic has kept you in a car for three weeks, and it will keep you there for thirty if nobody names it out loud.

So hear it named. You have no debt at that door. None at the throne and none in the fellowship hall, because every cost was carried already by Someone who was not surprised by your week, and God does not put a price on what His Son already paid. That is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it something you can walk on rather than something you agree with.

And let me put the practical half beside it, because a message without it has failed you. Keep every real help you have got. The meeting, the counselor, the doctor, the medicine you take, the woman who texts you Thursday whether you answer or not. None of it competes with what God is doing in you and none of it is small faith. It is His kindness arriving with a face and a phone number, and He never asks anybody to choose between His hand and the hands He sent.