Fifty Minutes in the Parking Lot

Row C of the leisure center parking lot faces a brick wall with a downspout on it, and Dana has learned that if she parks in row C she does not have to watch anybody walk in or out.

Freya swims Wednesdays, half past four until twenty past five. Fifty minutes. Some of the parents go in and sit up in the gallery behind the glass, where the air is thick and the noise comes off the water like something physical, and Dana did that twice and could not do it again. So she sits in the car. She has a paperback in the door pocket she has been on page ninety of since June. She has the radio, which at this hour is two men laughing about a sports result. She has her phone, which she has already looked at.

Fifty minutes. It does not sound like anything. Say it out loud to somebody and it sounds like a rest.

The hour used to have something in it. Not here, not in a parking lot, but at home, from about five, while the dinner was doing itself and the day was closing down. There was a thing she did at five, and the thing at five is not there now, and what is there instead is fifty minutes of brick wall and a downspout and two men on the radio laughing at something she has not been listening to.

She is not in danger. That is almost the hardest part to explain. Nothing is happening. Nobody would look at this car and see anything at all. There is just an amount of time that is exactly the wrong size, too long to sit through and too short to go anywhere, and it arrives every Wednesday, and it will arrive again next Wednesday, and the arithmetic of that stretches out ahead of her like a hallway with no door at the end.

At twenty past five Freya comes out with wet hair and a bag that smells of chlorine and gets in and talks the whole way home.

You know that hour. It might not be a parking lot. It might be the forty minutes between getting in and everybody else getting in, or the stretch after the news, or the piece of Sunday afternoon that goes on and on. It is not the crisis. The crisis you could rise to. This is the flat part, and nobody has ever sent anybody a card about the flat part.

You are kept in the fifty minutes, and you were never left to hold that stretch on your own. Psalm 121 says the Lord keeps your going out and your coming in, and it puts no gap between the two, which means the middle of the errand is inside the keeping and not outside it. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a fact you can feel in a parked car rather than a line you once underlined.

He keeps the going out and the coming in

Let me say the ache plainly before I say anything else about it, because it is an ache that gets no sympathy and that is half of what makes it heavy.

You are not fighting for your life at half past four on a Wednesday. You are sitting still. And sitting still is what you are worst at now, because the thing you used to do at this hour was not really about the taste of anything; it was about making an hour go somewhere. Take that away and the hour just stands there, and you find out how much of your day was being handled by something you are no longer handing it to.

Here is what the psalm actually says, and I want you to notice what is in it and what is not.

The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.Psalm 121:8

Two events are named. Going out. Coming in. And between the two of them, in every human life that has ever been lived, sits the enormous unglamorous middle: the drive, the wait, the parking lot, the fifty minutes. The psalm does not name the middle. It does not have to. If He keeps the leaving and He keeps the arriving, He has already accounted for everything strung between them, or the sentence means nothing at all.

You have a keeper in the middle of the errand, and you have Him at the dull end of it, not only at the dramatic end. That is what is written in Psalm 121, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a promise built for a pilgrim road and puts it down in a leisure center parking lot in row C without shrinking it on the way.

I know what the mind does with this. The mind says, fine, He is technically present, the way air is technically present. That is not what the psalm is describing. Look at the verses above it: He does not slumber. He does not sleep. He is the shade at your right hand. Those are not the words you use about a general principle. Those are the words you use about somebody actually there, awake, close enough to be shade, which is close enough to touch.

And notice the direction of the sentence. He preserves your going out. Not your performance. Not your record. The psalm never once measures the pilgrim. It only ever describes the keeper, and every single verb in it belongs to Him.

You are held by a God who does not sleep through the boring parts, and you were being kept during every hour you thought you were getting through alone. Scripture says He who keeps you will not slumber, and His Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and into an ordinary Wednesday where nothing is happening and nobody is watching.

There is one more thing in this psalm that matters more than it looks. The keeping is from this time forth. This time. Not from the point where you have got yourself sorted out, not from some future version of you who finds Wednesdays easy. From this time. The clock on the keeping starts at whatever o'clock it is where you are sitting.

You have His keeping starting from right now, and you have it without any qualifying period to serve first. From this time forth is how it is written, and the Holy Spirit does not run a waiting list, because there was never any entry requirement on a promise God made about Himself.

And because the flat hours are where people quietly come apart, let me say the ordinary thing too, and mean it: a friend who knows to text on Wednesdays, a doctor, a counselor, a room with a circle of chairs in it, all of that is God's kindness arriving with a face on it. Reaching for real help is not a smaller kind of faith. It is one of the ways He keeps people, and He has always used hands that had a name and a phone number.