Ninth Car in the Line

The stand outside the station holds eleven cars if everybody pulls up properly, and Karim is ninth, which on a Thursday between nine and ten means about an hour.

He knows the hour. Every driver on the rank knows the hour. The last commuter train has gone, the cinema crowd has not come out, the restaurants are still full of people who are not finished with their evenings. Eight cars ahead of him. Three of the drivers are standing between their open doors talking about nothing. One is asleep with the seat back. The lamps here throw a warm orange over the whole line, and the windows fog a little, and the meter of the night just stops.

There was a time when the hour ahead of him was the good part of the shift. Not because anything happened in it, but because there was a way to make it pass, and the way to make it pass fit neatly into a slow rank on a Thursday where nobody was checking. Nobody thinks about a man alone in a car. That is the whole design of the job.

Now the hour is just an hour. He has cleaned the inside of the windshield twice. He has eaten the sandwich he was saving. He has looked at the eight sets of tail lights in front of him and worked out that at four minutes a car he is looking at thirty two minutes before he even moves up to the front, and he has done that arithmetic three times as if it might come out differently.

Nothing is wrong. That is the strange, unsayable thing. Nothing is wrong at all. He is warm, the car is paid off, the family is asleep across town. He is simply sitting in an hour that has nothing in it, and an hour with nothing in it has become the loudest hour of his week.

At two minutes to ten the doors of the theater open and the whole street changes at once and the line starts moving and the hour is gone.

You know the hour. It might be a rank, or the last part of a shift, or the gap between the end of the day and the start of sleep. Nothing is on fire. There is just time, and the old way of spending it is standing at the edge of it being very quiet and very patient.

You are not alone in the slow hour, and you were being accompanied through it long before it occurred to you to ask. Psalm 139 says that even there, at the far edge of everything, His hand leads and His right hand holds, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that sentence out of the heavens and the depths and puts it down on an orange lit street with eight cars in front of you.

Even there, His hand

Let me name the weight before I say anything about lifting it, because this weight is easy to miss and impossible to explain to anybody who has not carried it.

You are not in danger tonight. You are bored, and tired, and alone, and those three together are the exact conditions under which a person reaches for whatever used to fill an hour. Not out of misery. Out of the ordinary human wish for the time to go somewhere. And the shame of that is its own second weight: if it were dramatic you could at least respect it. It is not dramatic. It is a Thursday.

Here is what David says, and notice where he goes looking for a place God is not.

If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.Psalm 139:9-10

He is not describing a devotional feeling. He is running an experiment. He goes up to the heavens and God is there. He makes his bed in the depths and God is there. He takes the wings of the morning and crosses the whole sea to the farthest edge of the map, the place nobody watches, the place with no witnesses, and he arrives and the hand is already there. Not sent after him. Already there.

You have arrived nowhere that God had to travel to reach, and you were being held before you got out of the car. That is what is written in Psalm 139, and it is His Spirit who makes the word even there land on a specific address at a specific hour instead of staying a general comfort.

Now look at what the hand does, because David uses two words and they are not the same word. It leads. And it holds. Leading is for the person going somewhere. Holding is for the person who has stopped. In a slow hour on a rank you are not going anywhere at all, and the psalm has already accounted for that: the right hand does not let go when the movement stops. Most people can believe God is with them while they are doing something. The test is the hour when nothing is being done.

You are held in the hour where you are producing nothing, and you were never valued by the meter. Scripture says His right hand shall hold me, and the Holy Spirit is the one who applies a promise made about the ends of the earth to a man sitting still in a warm car with the engine off.

There is a lie that lives specifically in a quiet hour, and it needs naming out loud. The lie is that this hour is unsupervised. That because nobody can see, nothing counts, and because nothing counts, nothing matters. Read the psalm again. The darkness and the light are both alike to Him. That sentence was not written to frighten anybody. It was written so that a person alone in the dark would understand that alone is not the same as unattended.

You have His attention in a place with no witnesses, and you have it as warmth and not as surveillance. The written word says the night shines as the day to Him, and the Holy Spirit does not come into a car at ten o'clock to catch a man out; He comes because that is where the man is.

And let me say the plain thing that belongs in every article on this site: the friend you could call from the rank, the doctor, the counselor, the room where people sit and say true things out loud, all of that is God's kindness with a face and a phone number. Using it is not a smaller faith than not using it. He has always led people through other people's hands.