Parked Outside Her Own Door

The engine has been off for eleven minutes and Simone is still in the driver's seat on her own driveway.

The hallway light is on inside. She can see the shape of somebody moving past the front room window, and the television is going, and her own key is in her own hand.

She is not avoiding the house. She likes the house. It is that the car is the only room in her life where nobody can hear her, and there is something she wants to say out loud, and she cannot say it in a kitchen with people in it.

So she says it to the windshield.

It has a shape, this thing she says. It has had a shape for a long while. It starts by acknowledging, which is a word she would never use out loud but which is exactly what the first part does. Then there is a middle section, the honest part, the part that took the longest to get right. Then it finishes with the ask, and the ask is careful, because she does not want to sound as though she assumes anything.

She gets three quarters of the way through and hears herself say a phrase she does not like the sound of. So she stops. And she starts again from the top, the way you do.

Second time through, the middle section comes out better and the ending comes out worse.

Somebody inside pulls the front room curtain across. The street lights come on. She sits there with her keys in her hand and the speech circling, and she has still not said one word of it to God, only to the glass.

You are the one in the driveway with the engine off. The speech is finished, more or less, and it has been finished for a while, and every time you get near saying it for real you find one more line in it that needs work.

The speech was never the toll

I am going to say the hard thing first, gently, because it is also the freeing thing, and the opposite of it has been riding in that car with you.

That speech is not a payment. It never was. Somewhere in the working of it, without ever deciding to, you turned it into a fee: the amount of honesty and the quality of phrasing that would have to be produced at the door before the door could be expected to open. That is why it keeps getting rewritten. Not because you are a perfectionist. Because a fee has to be right, and a fee that is one line short is not accepted, and part of you knows exactly how much is riding on it.

Take it out of that category altogether. You are received tonight, before the first line of it, and the receiving is not waiting on your draft. That is not my sentiment. Romans 5 puts it in writing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been sitting in that car with you through every rewrite, not marking it, and never once waiting for a better version.

I want to be careful here, because I am not telling you the honesty in that speech is worthless. It is not. Some of the truest sentences you have ever formed are in it. What I am taking away is its status. It is not a ticket. It is just true things you want to say to Somebody, and true things you want to say to Somebody are welcome at any moment and in any order, including badly.

You have a Father who has never once required a well made apology as the price of the door. It is written in Romans 5 exactly when the love was demonstrated, and the Spirit of God is the one who put the wanting to say it in you at all, which should tell you something about whose side of the door He is standing on.

While we were yet

Here is the verse, and the whole doctrine is in the timing of it, so listen for the when.

But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.Romans 5:8

While we were yet. Not after. Not once the wording had been settled. Not at the point where any of us had one clean sentence ready. The love was demonstrated, publicly and once and for all, at the moment when the entire human race had nothing at all prepared, and the word commendeth means He put it on display, proved it, made it a matter of record.

Get the order of events straight in your head and it will do more for you than any amount of rewriting. The welcome is older than your speech. It is older than the drift, and it is older than you. By the time you first thought of saying something to God, the thing you were hoping to obtain by saying it had already been settled for a very long time and had been on public display the whole while.

You are not negotiating tonight. You are being told what was decided. Romans 5 is where it stands written, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings a settled matter into a car on a driveway and makes it present tense in a woman who thought she was still in the middle of a process.

So the last mile is not yours. There is no stretch of this at the end that you have to cover under your own steam to prove the rest was sincere. That idea is everywhere in religion and it is nowhere in Romans 5.

This is yours, and it was finished before you sat down in the car: the whole distance was covered from His side. It is written that Christ died for us while we were yet, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a person over ground they were convinced they had to walk alone.

What to do with a speech that has already been paid

Now, practically. There is a document in your head and the obvious question is what to do with it.

Do not deliver it. Not because it is bad, and not as a punishment for over-preparing. Do not deliver it because delivering it will quietly re-establish the thing we just took down. The moment it comes out as a performance with a beginning, a middle and an ask, some part of you will start watching to see whether it landed well enough, and you will be back to grading yourself at the door of a house that was already open.

Say one plain sentence instead. One. Whatever is actually in you when you stop trying to construct it.

And hear this, because it is the part people miss: the plain sentence is not the budget version. It is not what you settle for because the good speech was too hard. It is the more honest of the two, and it always was, and the reason it is frightening is that it has nothing in front of it to hide behind.

You have permission to abandon the speech and say the small thing, and nobody is going to mark the small thing. Romans 5 makes the grading unnecessary, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a sentence God had already answered before it was spoken.