The Last Car in the Line

The line moves the way it always moves, one car length at a time, and then it is her turn at the gate.

She leans across and undoes the belt herself, because his fingers still are not sure of it, and he goes out sideways with the book bag catching on the handle, and he is running before the door has shut. He does not look back. He has not looked back since October, and she has decided to be pleased about that.

Then the line is behind her and the mirror is empty. The car in front pulls away. She indicates, and does not go.

The engine keeps running. The heater ticks. On the radio an ad break ends and a song starts that she knows every word of and could not name, and she sits at the top of an empty drop-off lane with eleven minutes in her hands and nobody at all wanting anything from her.

It is the eleven minutes that does it. Nothing else happens. There is simply a gap in the day, and into the gap comes a small plain thought, the way a plain thought does when the noise stops: she has not said anything to God in a long time.

Not a bad thing. Not a hard thing. Nothing. She could not tell you the last time, or the season it was in, or what was going on that week.

She would still say she believes it. She would say it to anybody who asked.

The crossing lady waves her on, kindly, and she lifts a hand and pulls out.

You are the last car in the line. There was no falling out and no decision and nothing you could put in a sentence if somebody asked, and the not being able to put it in a sentence has quietly become the reason you have not started.

Nobody switched the station off

I want to give you one picture, and then I want to get out of its way, because it is the only thing I own that is the right shape for this.

You know the drive where the radio goes. Not the one where you press a button. The long one, out past the last roundabout, where the song on the radio starts to thin. A hiss comes in underneath it. It lifts back for a second, so you turn it up, which never works. Then there is a stretch of hedge and a hill, and it is gone, and you drive on in a quiet you did not choose and did not notice choosing.

Nobody switched the station off.

That is the whole picture and it is yours to keep. The transmitter never blinked. There was no fault at the tower, no announcement, no fade out with somebody explaining why. There was a hill and a bend and a road that goes where it goes.

I am not going to tell you what your hill was. I do not know, and I have noticed that whoever tells you is almost always guessing, and that a guess handed to a tired person becomes a debt they did not arrive with. You did not come here to be diagnosed. You came here in the eleven minutes.

So take this instead, and take it as a finished thing rather than a hopeful one. You are inside the signal right now, as you read this, and there is no coverage map anywhere on which you were outside it. That is not a warm sentence I made up in a car. It is written down, and it was written down long before either of us, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my saying of it who makes a written line come through clear in a drop-off lane at nine in the morning:

Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.Jeremiah 31:3

Therefore. That is the hinge of the verse and it points backward. The drawing is a consequence of the love and never a reward for the noticing.

Drawn is a quiet word

Look at the verb, because everything is in the verb. Drawn.

Not summoned. Not fetched. Not marched back under escort with a list of what happened. Drawn is what a song does to your foot under the table while your attention is somewhere else entirely. You do not decide to tap. You look down and it is already going.

That is how He has been working on you, and it is why there is nothing to report. The drawing does not announce itself, and it almost never feels like anything, and a person waiting to feel drawn before they will believe they are being drawn can stand a long while beside something that is already happening.

Think about the eleven minutes again. The gap was not empty. Nothing arrived in it from outside your own head, you would say, and I would say that a plain small thought about God, turning up uninvited in the one quiet slot of a loud week, is not a thought that generates itself. Everlasting love, and then the drawing that comes out of it. That is the order Jeremiah puts it in. The love first, the drawing as its consequence, and neither of them waiting on anything from your side.

You have been drawn already, and the drawing is not a thing you begin; it is a thing you notice you are inside of. Jeremiah 31 is the ground under that, and His Spirit is the one who has been doing it in a car and a kitchen and a supermarket queue while you got on with the week.

You do not drive the road back

Here is the part that takes the size out of it.

The drift took the whole length of the road. It took the hedge and the hill and the bend and the miles after, because that is how a signal goes: gradually, in a way nobody could timestamp. So the arithmetic in your head says the way back must be the same distance in the other direction. Every mile. In reverse. With the hiss.

It is not.

When the signal comes back it does not come back faintly and build. There is no ramp. You crest a hill and it is simply there, whole, at full volume, mid song, as though it had been playing the entire time, which it had. The road was never the thing. The road was only ever the reason you could not hear it.

Scripture says the same thing without the car, and it puts it in one line:

The LORD is nigh unto all them that call upon him, to all that call upon him in truth.Psalm 145:18

Nigh is a position word and not a reward word. He is not near because somebody called well. He is near, and the calling finds Him where He already stood.

You are not being brought back in stages, and there is no probation waiting on the far side of your hill. That is written in Psalm 145:18 and softened nowhere else in the book, and it is the same Spirit who put the thought into the eleven minutes who is carrying it to you now.

Which means there is nothing to prepare. No account of the years. No reconstruction of when it started, which you have tried and cannot do. You are not required to explain a silence that had no argument in it, because He has never once asked for the explanation and there is no verse anywhere in which He does.