Four Miles Out Of Your Way

Neil signals three streets early, the way he has signaled three streets early for nine years.

There is nothing wrong with the road he is turning off. Half a mile further on it meets the highway at a junction with a gas station on the corner, a green canopy, a car wash that has had an out of order sign on it since before the canopy was green. Traffic lights. A left turn arrow. A crosswalk nobody uses.

He does not go through it.

Instead he turns by the school, along the back of the industrial park, out past the reservoir where the hedges close in, then the long straight, then back onto the highway four miles further along. It adds eight minutes. Sixteen minutes a day. He has never once been late because of it, because he leaves fifteen minutes earlier than he needs to, and his wife thinks that is just what Neil is like.

She does not know. Nobody knows. When somebody is in the car with him he says the lights on the highway are a nightmare at this time, and they agree, because everybody believes traffic.

Here is the thing he could not explain if he tried. He is not frightened while he drives the long way. He is not thinking about anything. He puts the radio on and he thinks about the invoice he has to chase and whether the recycling went out. The long way is not a struggle. It is not even a decision anymore. It is a shape his week is built around, the way a house gets built around a beam.

Once, about four years ago, a detour put him on the highway with no way off, and he came up on that junction from the far side with no warning at all.

His hands went cold on the wheel. Not shaking. Cold, and heavy, and somehow far away, as though they belonged to somebody else who was also driving. He got through the lights. He pulled onto the shoulder two hundred yards on and sat there for eleven minutes with the engine running, and a man in a van slowed to check he was all right, and Neil gave him a thumbs up, and the man drove on.

Then he drove to work and had a normal day and told nobody.

That is you, signaling early. Maybe yours is not a junction. Maybe it is a corridor at a hospital, a particular platform, a street with a bakery on it, the third week of October. And maybe the worst part is not the avoiding. The worst part is that you have never said it out loud to one living soul, because you can already hear how small it would sound.

It is not small. And before another word: what your body does near that place is not a failure of faith, and it is not weakness, and it is not you being dramatic. Something happened. Your body kept a record of it that it was never asked to keep. That is not a fault in you. Nobody here is going to ask you what happened, either. It is yours, and you do not owe it to anybody, including me.

What A Hiding Place Is Actually For

There is a line in the Psalms that I want to put underneath you, and it is a strange one, because it is God describing Himself as somewhere to go and not stand out in the open.

Thou art my hiding place; thou shalt preserve me from trouble; thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliverance.Psalm 32:7

Three things, and they come in that order for a reason.

A hiding place first. Not a parade ground. Not a witness box. God does not open by telling the man to go back and face the thing, He opens by being somewhere for him to be. And think about what that settles. If God Himself is willing to be called a hiding place, then needing somewhere to get out of the open is not a character flaw, and never was.

So hear it as it stands. You are not a coward and you are not stuck. You are a person with a covering, and Psalm 32:7 says the covering is a Person and not a road you have to prove yourself on. The Holy Spirit is not standing at that junction with a clipboard, timing you.

Then, preserve me from trouble. Preserve is a guarding word. It is what you do with something valuable, deliberately, at cost. Not a wish that trouble might stay away, but Somebody placing Himself between you and it and staying there.

And notice what has been true for nine years without anybody remarking on it. You have been kept. Every day of that long way around, on the good ones and on the eleven minutes on the shoulder, you were guarded by the same God who had that line written down, and His Spirit was in the car. You did not feel it and it happened anyway.

Then the third clause, which is the one I would sing over you if I could. Compass me about with songs of deliverance. Compass about means surround, all sides, a ring. Not one song out in front to follow. Not a song behind you to remember. Around.

And deliverance is past tense in that sentence. They are songs about something already done. So what surrounds you is not a lecture about the junction and not a plan for getting through it. It is the sound of what God has already finished, on every side of you, in the car, on the long way, at the lights. It is already yours, and it does not switch off at that junction. His word says so, and His Spirit is the one making that sound in a life, not the strength of your own nerves.

One more thing said plainly and warmly, because on this site it always gets said. A good doctor, and a therapist who understands what a body does with a day it never processed, are ordinary gifts of God. Going through that door is not a lack of trust and never has been. If your hands go cold on a wheel, that is worth telling someone who knows about hands and wheels.