The Drive Home After the Shout

Twenty minutes of highway with the radio off, which is not usual, because she always has the radio on.

It was a real night. That has to be said first and said plainly, because everything that follows depends on it being true.

The room broke open. Not manufactured, not worked up, not a musician holding a chord until something happens. It came in about the third song and it went for a long time and she was in the middle of it. She prayed with a woman she had never met who was in genuine trouble, and something happened there that neither of them arranged. She sang until her voice went. She meant every syllable of it.

And she is twenty minutes down the highway with the radio off and there is something in her that the whole evening did not touch.

And she has spent about eleven of those twenty minutes arriving at a conclusion, and the conclusion is: I am a hypocrite.

Because how does a person be in that room, genuinely in it, hands up, voice gone, praying with a stranger, and get in a car and drive twenty minutes and be dry. Either the room was fake or she is, and she was there and she knows the room was not fake, so it must be her, and it must have been her for a long time, and the years of it stack up fast on an empty highway.

That is where she is at mile marker whatever it is, and the exit is coming up, and she is not going to say a word about any of this to anybody in that church ever.

And you know that drive. Something real happened and you were in it, and then a while later there is a hunger sitting exactly where it was before, and you have taken that as a verdict on yourself.

So take this in before we go a step further. You are not a hypocrite and the room was not fake and neither were you. Psalm 84:2 says my soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of the LORD, and the man writing it is a temple singer who was in those courts constantly, and the Holy Spirit is in this car with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

He had already seen Him in the sanctuary

There is a psalm written from a wilderness, and the detail everybody skips is that the man writing it is not describing something he has never had.

O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is.Psalm 63:1

That is verse one. Now here is verse two, in the same psalm, four lines later.

To see thy power and thy glory, so as I have seen thee in the sanctuary.

So as I have seen thee. Past tense. He has been in the sanctuary. He has seen the power and the glory there, and he says so, and he is not doubting it or taking it back.

And he is thirsty. In the same psalm. In a dry land where no water is, having genuinely seen God in the sanctuary, this man's soul is thirsting, and nowhere in the psalm does he treat that as a contradiction requiring explanation. He does not stop to defend his sincerity. He does not wonder whether the sanctuary was real.

He had it, and he wants it, and both of those are in the same short psalm and neither one is presented as evidence against the other.

You are somebody who has genuinely seen and is genuinely thirsty, and Scripture has never once treated that as a contradiction. The written word puts a man's real memory of the sanctuary four lines from his real thirst in a wilderness, which means the twenty minutes on the highway proves nothing about the room; and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a car with the radio off.

And notice where he is when he writes it. Not in the sanctuary. In the wilderness. Which is to say: on the drive home.

Being filled is not being finished

I want to take the conclusion apart, because it is doing you real damage and it is built on a hidden assumption you have never examined.

The assumption is that a genuine encounter should be terminal. That if it were real, it would have finished the hunger, and therefore a hunger that returns is proof the encounter was not real or you were not.

Nothing anywhere supports that. It is not how anything works. It is not how food works, or sleep, or being known by somebody, and it is certainly not how this works, and if it were, the man in Psalm 63 would have had nothing to write about.

You were filled tonight. You were also still a person who thirsts, because that is a permanent property of the creature and not a defect in the filling.

You were genuinely filled and you are genuinely hungry, and the second does not undo the first. Psalm 42:1 says as the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God, and it is written by somebody who had led the procession into the house of God; His Spirit is the one who is both the water and the thirst, and He is not auditing your sincerity twenty minutes down a highway.

And here is the second half, and I want to be careful. I am not going to tell you what this particular hunger is about. I do not know what it is aimed at and neither does anybody writing at a distance, and the business of explaining a woman to herself in print is a bad business and has hurt a lot of people who were doing fine.

What is true is that it is real, and it does not have to be traced to a source before it can be met, and there is no requirement anywhere that a person understand their thirst before they are allowed to drink.

You are not being asked for an account, and no explanation is required first. Psalm 63:8 says my soul followeth hard after thee: thy right hand upholdeth me, and both halves are in the same sentence, the following and the being held; the same Spirit who had that written is the one who was in that room tonight and is in this car now.

The highway is in the psalm

Here is what I want you to have before your exit.

You have been treating the sanctuary as the real part and the drive as the failure. The psalm does the opposite. The psalm is written from the drive. Verse one is the highway. The sanctuary is the memory inside it, held onto, referred back to, and completely undisputed.

Which means the twenty minutes you have just spent are not the place where the evening got exposed. They are the place where the psalm gets written. That is what a wilderness is for in that book: it is where people say the truest things they ever say, and the sanctuary nights are what they say them from.

You are exactly where the honest words get spoken, and you have been all twenty minutes. Scripture says my soul thirsteth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, and it is said by a man who had seen the power and the glory in the sanctuary and was not confused about it; the Holy Spirit is the one who turned the radio off.

So the highway is not where you were found out. It is where the sixty-third psalm comes from, and there is a woman in a car who was genuinely in that room tonight and is genuinely thirsty now, and both of those are in the same psalm.

And one plain thing before we go on. If the ache has gone further than an ache, find a real person this week and let them be with you in it. If it has turned into not wanting to be here, tell somebody today; in the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour and a real person will answer.