Raised Voices In A Parking Lot

He is at the back of his car with three bags of groceries in and one to go, twenty past four on an ordinary Tuesday.

The parking lot is half full. Somebody has left a cart in the space beside him with one wheel turned out. A bird is making a racket in the light pole and the asphalt is putting heat through his shoes.

Then two people, four spaces down, start in on each other.

He does not even know what it is about. A space, or a door opened into a fender. Her voice goes up first and his comes over the top of it, and there it is: the pitch a voice takes on when it has stopped being about the thing.

And he is not in the parking lot anymore.

He is nine, standing in a doorway, a light on over the stove and the rest of the house dark behind him. That is all of it. A doorway, a strip of light, and two voices in a room he is not in.

He is not remembering it. That is the part nobody warns you about. Remembering is something you do with your mind, and you can put it down again. This is not that. His hands have gone cold on the handle of the last bag, his breath has moved up into the top of his chest, and his body has concluded, without consulting him, that the safest thing available is to be very still and very quiet.

It lasts twelve seconds.

The two people get into separate cars. Doors slam. Neither looks over. Nobody saw a thing, because there was nothing to see: a man holding a bag of groceries a beat longer than a bag of groceries takes.

He puts it in. He shuts the trunk. He gets into the driver's seat with the keys in his hand and does not start the engine, because his hands are not right.

And then the second thing arrives, which is worse than the first. He is a grown man with a mortgage and a bad knee. It was thirty years ago and it is over, and here he is at twenty past four unable to turn a key.

That is you, with the keys in your hand.

Maybe it is not a parking lot. Maybe it is a raised voice on a television in the next room, or a certain hour of the evening, or one particular smell. Maybe you have never told a living soul that it happens.

And I am not going to ask you what the kitchen was. Not now, not further down, not as the price of anything here. You do not owe this page an account and you do not owe God one. What I will say first: what your body did back there is not a failure of faith. It is not backsliding, it is not a lack of trust, and it is not evidence that something in you never took. Nobody in heaven is disappointed in you at twenty past four.

The Verse That Never Asks You What Happened

David is in the middle of a psalm about enemies and a siege. And then, with no warning, he sets down a line most people would not say at a dinner table.

When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up.Psalm 27:10

Read what is not in it. No account. No detail, no incident, no year, no room. David does not build a case, name a fault or explain himself, and the verse never stops to ask him to. It names the thing in six words and goes straight to what God does.

So let this come off you first, because you have carried it since roughly the age of nine: you are not being asked for a statement. Psalm 27:10 required none from David, and His Spirit is not standing in a parking lot waiting for you to produce one before He comes near. You have never had to prove your case to get His attention.

And look at the verb, because it is the most physical word in the line. Take me up. Not comfort me about it. Take up, the way a man bends and picks up what somebody else set down and walked away from.

That is the sentence to stand in tonight. You were picked up. Not scheduled to be and not eligible to be: the word says the Lord takes up, and the same Spirit who moved on David has kept you upright through every ordinary Tuesday since.

Now the wire that always gets attached to this subject, and I want to cut it in front of you. Nowhere in Psalm 27:10 is there a condition. It does not read, when my father and my mother forsake me, and once I have forgiven them properly, then the LORD will take me up. That clause is not in the verse. Somebody added it later, and it has kept a great many good people standing outside a door that was open the whole time.

Forgiveness is real and good and it is God's own work in a person. It is not a toll gate. You are not on a waiting list for peace, pending a transaction with somebody who may not even be alive. His word puts the taking up first, before anything you manage, and His Spirit does that slow work in a heart at His own pace and never at gunpoint. If forgiving is a road you are walking with time and help, walk it. You are not held at the border while you do.

And hear this one plainly too. You did not do this to yourself. A nine-year-old in a doorway is not responsible for the weather in the room, and a grown man is not responsible for what his body learned in order to keep that boy safe. What happened by the trunk was protection. It worked. It has outlived the house it was built for, and a thing that has outlived its use is not a sin.

There are people whose actual profession is helping a body learn that a thing is over. Doctors, counselors and therapists who do this all day and are good at it. Going to one of them is not a failure of trust and not a spiritual demotion. It is one of the ordinary ways God takes a person up, the same way He does with bread and neighbors and sleep.

And what is true of you does not switch off and on with your nervous system. You are His in the parking lot and His in the twelve seconds, and Psalm 27 files no exemption for the seconds when your hands go cold. His Spirit was not waiting outside the car for you to come back to yourself.