Eleven Years In the Parking Lot

The drizzle had been coming down since before daylight, the kind that is not enough for the wipers and too much without them, so Camille ran them on the slowest setting and let the glass go blurry in between.

She parked where she always parked. The hardware store across the street opened at noon on Sundays, so the lot was empty except for her, and she took the slot by the propane cage because the cage blocked the view from the road on one side. Engine off. Travel mug in the holder. Radio down so low it was mostly a suggestion.

Eleven years, she could tell you the whole order of the morning without hearing a note of it. The double doors get propped at ten fifteen. The man with the folding umbrella walks the far corner of the lot at ten twenty because he cannot stand still. Ten thirty the doors close and the sound of the organ comes across the street with the shape taken out of it, so it is more like weather than music. Eleven forty the doors go again and everybody comes out slow, because they never can just leave.

She had a speech. That was the thing nobody would have guessed to look at her. She had a whole speech worked out for the day she walked in, and she had been revising it since the second year, and here is what had happened to it: every year it got longer. The first version was two sentences. The version she had now took the whole side of a page in her head and covered where she had been, and why, and the part about her sister, and the part that was nobody's business but that she felt she owed them anyway, and by now the speech had gotten so long that she could not get through it, and if she could not get through the speech she certainly could not go in.

That Sunday somebody came out at ten twenty-five. A woman in a raincoat with the hood up, holding a bulletin, and she came right across the street through the drizzle and Camille's whole body went stiff.

The woman did not come to the window. She slid the bulletin under the passenger side wiper, patted the hood twice like you would pat a horse, made a small drinking motion with her hand toward the doors, smiled, and went back inside.

Camille sat there with the wipers going on the slow setting, the bulletin flapping under the blade, and not one word of the speech required.

Maybe you have a speech too. Maybe the years have gotten long enough that going back would mean an account of them, and the account is more than you have in you, so you stay where you can hear the organ come across the street. You are invited, right now, as you read this, and the invitation has no explanation attached to the front of it. That is what His word does with people who have been away, and the Holy Spirit is the One who carries an invitation like that across a street and puts it in your hands.

Return is a word God says first

There is a moment in Jeremiah where God gives the prophet a strange errand. He tells him to face north and proclaim. North is the direction the people had gone, and what God sends after them is not a summons and not a hearing. It is a proclamation. Somebody stands out in the open and says the message out loud to the horizon.

And here is who it is said to. A nation. A whole people who had walked off together, and God speaks to them in the plural, the way He nearly always does. That matters for you today because the invitation of God has never once been a private arrangement between Him and one heart, and it is not romantic and it never was. He calls a company home. You are inside the company, and the word aimed at them is aimed at you.

You are inside a people God is calling back, and the calling is in the present tense right where you are sitting. His word says He sent that proclamation, and the same Holy Spirit who moved the prophet to say it is the One saying it over you now.

Go and proclaim these words toward the north, and say, Return, thou backsliding Israel, saith the LORD; and I will not cause mine anger to fall upon you: for I am merciful, saith the LORD, and I will not keep anger for ever.Jeremiah 3:12

Look at what God puts in the message and, more to the point, what He leaves out. There is no accounting. There is no list of what they did. He does not open with the years. He opens with the word return and then He immediately tells them what He is not bringing with Him when they get there.

You have an invitation that stands today, and the anger you were bracing for is already settled and is not waiting at the door. That is the promised word of God in that sentence, and it is His Spirit who makes it more than ink.

The speech was never the ticket

The very next thing God asks in that chapter is one thing only: acknowledge it. Not explain it. Not justify it. Not compose an account that satisfies a room. Acknowledge, which takes about four words and no preparation whatsoever.

We build the speech because we assume the door has a toll on it. Somewhere along the way we picked up the idea that time away accrues, that it accumulates like interest, and that the sum has to be paid at the entrance in the currency of explanation. That is not in the text. It is not anywhere in the text.

And I will say the other half of it plainly, because you have probably been told it in some form. Those eleven years were not wasted. I am not going to tell you they were, and God does not say it either. He does not stand at the door of the years and grade them. He says return, and He says what He is not carrying, and that is the whole message.

You are being spoken to by a God who leads with mercy, and you have that mercy in hand right now. Scripture says He will not keep His anger forever, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a promise like that out of the past tense and lays it in your lap in a parked car.