Pulled Over On The Way To Work

The rain came in sideways off the fields and the wipers could not keep up with it.

That is all. That is the whole of what was happening. Twenty past seven, the same road she has driven maybe nine hundred times, brake lights blooming red ahead of her where the lane narrows by the garage, and rain hammering the roof so hard she could not hear the radio.

Then her heart went.

Not a flutter. A bolt, straight up through her chest and into her jaw, and her hands went numb on the wheel, and the road ahead did a strange thing where it seemed to be further away than it was. She heard herself say oh no out loud in an empty car. And then the thought that always comes, the one that arrives like a passenger who has been sitting in the back seat the whole time: I am going to have to get out of this car.

She got the hazard lights on. She does not remember deciding to. She came off onto the verge with two wheels in the wet grass and put the handbrake on and sat there with the wipers still going, thump, thump, thump, and the lorries going past shaking the whole car every eight seconds.

And here is the part that keeps her awake. Nothing had happened.

Nobody cut her up. There was no near miss. There was no bad news that morning and no argument the night before. It was a Tuesday, in the rain, on the road to work, and her body sounded a fire alarm in a building where there was no fire, and now she is sitting on a verge at half past seven and she is going to be late, and she is going to have to say something to somebody, and there is no sentence in the English language that makes this sound like anything other than what she is afraid it is.

I am going to stop describing her now.

Because you know the second wave. The first one is the body. The second one is the shame, and it arrives about ninety seconds later, and for many of you it is the worse of the two: the humiliation of it, the strangers going past, the calculating of what you will tell them, the awful question underneath everything, which is what is wrong with me.

Beloved, listen to me. Nothing is wrong with you that makes you less loved than you were at twenty past seven.

You did not fail at anything on that verge

I want to say the plainest thing I know before I say anything else, and I want you to hear it in your body and not just in your head.

That was not a lack of faith.

An alarm went off in a body that has been carrying more than it has told anybody about, and an alarm is not a sin and it is not a verdict and it is not a report on your walk with God. People who love Jesus with everything they have sit on verges. If you have been quietly grading yourself since Tuesday, put the pen down. There is no mark being given.

And I am not going to hand you a big thing to do, because a big thing is exactly what you do not have right now. This is the hour for something small enough to actually take.

So here is the small thing. One hand.

For I the LORD thy God will hold thy right hand, saying unto thee, Fear not; I will help thee.Isaiah 41:13

Look at what He is actually doing in that verse, because it is not what people usually quote it for.

He is not standing at the front of the room explaining the situation. He is not waiting until you are composed. He takes hold of the hand. That is the picture, and it is a physical, undignified, close-up kind of help, the sort of thing you do for somebody on a verge in the rain rather than the sort of thing you say from a stage.

And notice which hand. The right hand. In that world, the right hand is the working hand, the strong one, the one that holds the tool and signs the thing and does the job. God comes and takes the hand you do your competence with. He takes the hand that was gripping the wheel. He takes it while it is shaking, and He does not say be still first, and He does not say come back when you have got yourself together.

Fear not is not a command to feel differently. Fear not is what a person says while they are holding you. It is the sentence you say to someone whose hand is already in yours.

One true thing at this hour, and it holds. He is here. That is small enough to take on a verge with the lorries going past, and it is the whole dose.