The Two Weeks She Counted in the Car

She has nine minutes in the car before she has to be anywhere, and she is spending them on the steering wheel.

The tasting went well. Two hundred guests in September, the mother of the bride wants the little tarts, and there is a spreadsheet on the passenger seat with a coffee ring on it. She does the food out of her own kitchen for weddings, christenings, the retirement do at the depot, and a Tuesday lunch at the community center that pays her almost nothing and that she would not give up for anything.

At the center this morning, one of the older ladies took hold of her wrist as she was clearing and said, "And how are you doing, love. Really." And she said, "Oh, busy, you know," and picked up the tray, and the woman let go of her wrist and let her go.

Now, in the car, she decides to actually answer it. Not to anyone. Just to herself, honestly, the way you would count stock.

Fourteen days. She does them on her fingers against the wheel, working backward. The Saturday and the Saturday before. Two trips to her mother's with the shopping. The parents' evening. The night she fell asleep on the sofa with the invoices open. The morning she cried in the pantry for four minutes about nothing at all and then went and did the sausage rolls.

And not one of those days was wicked. That is what stops her. There is nothing on the count she would hide. It is a good life, a useful life, a life other people lean on.

There is also no God anywhere in it. Not once, except in this same car, at the lights, when something came on the radio and she said "Yeah, Lord" out loud and turned it up, and that was the whole of it.

She would have told you, at any point in those fourteen days, that God is the center of her life. She would have said it and meant it and been telling you about a place she has not visited.

Her phone goes. It is the mother of the bride, about the tarts. She answers it bright, because she is good at bright, and she pulls out of the space.

You know that count. Yours is different in the details and identical in the shape, and the frightening part was never that the list is shameful. The frightening part is that it is accurate.

Nobody in this room is going to take the count off you

You are safe here, and I am not going to do the thing you are braced for. I am not going to read your two weeks back to you, and I am not going to ask you for the list. What I have to hand you is written down and it is older than both of us, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a written thing warm in a car with the engine off.

Here is what people do with a count like that. They either bury it, which is why the answer at the hall was "busy, you know," or they publish it, and turn honesty into a punishment they administer to themselves. You have probably done both this month. And neither one of them is what honesty is for.

You are not being audited tonight, and there is no page anywhere with your fourteen days on it waiting to be read out. That is not my kindness talking; it is written into Psalm 139, and I am going to put the line in front of you, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been keeping a small honest question alive in you since somebody took hold of your wrist.

Honesty in front of God has never once been a means of informing Him.

He was already acquainted with it

Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways.Psalm 139:3

Take that word acquainted, because English has gone thin on it and the Hebrew has not. It is not the acquaintance of a man who has read your file. It is the familiarity of somebody who lives in the house. Who knows which stair creaks. Who knows that the third burner has to be lit twice, and that you cry in the pantry and then do the sausage rolls, and who has never once been surprised by any of it.

And notice what the psalm puts around Him being acquainted. It puts the path and the lying down: the going out and the coming in, the working and the sleeping, the whole of a life named by its two ends. There is no wing of your fourteen days He has not been in.

You are known all the way down, and the knowing came first, and it came before you were ready to be honest about any of it. I am not putting my own idea over you there. That is Psalm 139:3 standing where it has always stood, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ancient line land in a woman in a parking lot with a spreadsheet on the seat beside her.

So when you say the honest thing, you are not handing Him news. You are agreeing with somebody who has been living in the house.

Being seen is not the same as being written off

This is the part I most want you to have, because I think you have quietly fused two things that Scripture keeps a long way apart, and the Holy Spirit has been prying them back apart in you since somebody took hold of your wrist and asked.

Somewhere in you, seen and finished have become one word. If He knows where the two weeks actually went, then He knows, and if He knows then something follows, and you have never let yourself find out what. So you have kept the counting for the car, where nobody hears it and nothing follows.

Go to a spring in the desert, then. There is a woman out there who has run from a house where she was badly treated, pregnant and with nothing, and the angel of the Lord finds her by the water and calls her by her name. And she says a thing that no one had said before her: Thou God seest me (Genesis 16:13). She had been seen at the worst hour of her life, and the seeing came out as mercy, and she named a well after it.

You are seen exactly where you actually live, and the seeing has come toward you as mercy and not as a verdict. It is written in Genesis 16 and it is written again in Psalm 139, and the same Spirit who moved on both of those pages is the one turning the honest question over in you now. He does not find out and withdraw. He knows, and He comes.

That is the whole difference between an audit and a visit. An audit arrives to establish what is there. He already knows what is there. He arrives because He wants to be where you are.