The Last Car in the Church Lot

Everybody has gone. The van left twenty minutes ago with the youth group in it and the pastor's car went about ten minutes after that, and there is one car left in this lot and she is sitting in it.

She has not started the engine.

She has been going to this church for nineteen years. She could name most of the people who were in that building this morning, and their children, and who is sick and who is not. She sang. She said good morning about forty times and meant most of them. Two different women hugged her at the door.

And she has never felt further from another human being in her life.

Six days ago she found something out about somebody she loves. And this morning she sat in a room with two hundred people who genuinely care about her, and every single one of them said something kind, and the whole thing went past her like weather on a window.

Here is what she has been sitting here trying to work out for forty minutes: how a person can be surrounded and completely alone at the same time, and whether that means something is wrong with her, or with them, or with the whole nineteen years.

Because the loneliest thing in that building was not being ignored. She was not ignored. It was standing in the middle of people who love her, holding the one thing that has taken over her entire life, and knowing that not one of them could be told, and watching herself say fine, thank you, forty times.

And the second loneliest thing was that everybody looked happy. And she cannot work out whether they actually are, or whether she has just discovered that a room full of people saying fine is not a room full of people who are fine, and that she has been in that room for nineteen years without knowing it.

And you know that lot. You found out about somebody you love, and you took it into a room full of people who care about you, and it did not get any lighter, and the not-getting-lighter felt like a verdict on every relationship you have.

So take this in before we go one step further, because you have been in this car for forty minutes. You are not alone in this parking lot and you were not alone in that room. Psalm 139:5 says thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me, and beset there is a word about being surrounded on every side, and the Holy Spirit is in this car with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

He names the closest ones first

There is a line in the twenty-seventh psalm that people find harsh, and the harshness is the reason it is any use to you this morning.

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

Look at who gets named. Not a friend who let you down. Not a church that was disappointing. Father and mother, which is the closest and most obligated relationship a human being has, the one that is supposed to be structurally impossible to fall out of.

And the psalm does not soften it. It does not say if. It does not add a clause about how they probably did their best. It simply states the case, flatly, and then says what happens next.

Then the LORD takes me up. The word carries the sense of gathering somebody in, of picking up what has been left. It is what you do with a thing that has been set down and not collected.

That verse is not about people being bad. It is about the ceiling on what any human relationship can reach, named at the very top of the range, so that nobody reading it can say: yes, but my people are closer than that.

You are gathered up by somebody whose reach does not have that ceiling. The written word names the closest human bond available and then puts God's action on the far side of its failure, which means the distance you felt this morning is a fact about the ceiling and not a finding about your church; and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the gathering, in a lot, in the last car, with the building locked.

The room was not failing you

I want to take something off you, because you have spent forty minutes building a case and the case is against the wrong defendant.

Those people did not fail you this morning. They could not have reached you, because you were carrying something they were not told, and there is no amount of love in a room that can reach across a thing nobody in it knows about. That is not a defect in them and it is not hypocrisy in you. It is arithmetic.

And the second conclusion, the one about the whole nineteen years, is the one that would cost you the most and it is the least reliable. You are six days in, running on almost nothing, and a mind in that condition reaches enormous conclusions at speed and presents them as insight. Any verdict on nineteen years arriving in a parking lot on day six should be filed under weather.

You were never being failed, and the ache in that room was the shape of a thing unsaid. Psalm 34:18 says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, and it reports where He already is rather than what a person has to do to be reached; His Spirit is the one who has been that near since the first hymn, and He is not evaluating how well you sang.

And here is the second half, and it is the one that opens a door. What you experienced this morning is not proof that nobody can be told. It is proof that nobody has been. Those are entirely different findings, and you have been treating the first one as established for six days on the evidence of the second.

You are not out of reach, and you have not been tested and found to be. Ecclesiastes 4:10 says woe to him that is alone when he falleth, for he hath not another to help him up, and it is written as a plain observation about how people are built rather than as an accusation; the same Spirit who had that written is the one who kept you in this lot instead of driving home to an empty afternoon.

And I am not going to soften this next part. Six days is long enough. Find one real person this week, and it does not have to be from that building if the whole building knows everybody. A counselor, a pastor two towns over, a doctor if you are not sleeping. You do not have to name anybody. I am carrying something I cannot talk about is a complete and honest sentence and it is enough to get somebody help. If it gets darker than tired, do not wait; in the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour and a person will answer.

What forty minutes in a lot is for

Here is what today is actually for, and it is smaller than you wanted when you sat down in this car.

Not a decision about anybody. You are six days in.

Not a conclusion about your church. That one is not available to you this week and will look different in a month.

What today is for is noticing that you have been sitting in a locked lot for forty minutes rather than going home, and that this is not aimlessness. Some part of you did not want to be alone yet and could not think of anywhere to go, and stayed near a building where you have been loved for nineteen years. That is not nothing. That is a person reaching, without a plan, in the only direction available.

You are being gathered up while you sit here, and the gathering did not wait for you to have a plan. Scripture says then the LORD will take me up, and taking up is what somebody does with what has been set down; the Holy Spirit is the one who kept you in a parking lot rather than in a driveway.

So the lot is not empty. There is one car in it and two people, and a woman who was never as far from everybody as she felt at eleven o'clock this morning.