What I Thought In The Parking Lot

Saturday, half past ten, and a man in a green coat took about four minutes to get out of a parking space.

He was old. That was clear from the road. Slow with the mirrors, then slow with the wheel, then stopped entirely for a moment for reasons nobody else could see.

And what went through the head of the man waiting behind him was not impatience. Impatience would be ordinary and forgivable. It was a full paragraph, contemptuous, specific, and unrepeatable, about that man and about people like that man and about what should be done about them, and it arrived complete and it took about two seconds.

Then the green coat got out of the space, and the man behind him drove into it, and helped a woman with a cart on the way in because that is what he does.

At church the next morning somebody said, in passing, that he is one of the kindest men in that congregation. He has heard versions of this his whole adult life. His own mother says it.

He has not been able to look at Saturday since.

You know that paragraph. Something arrives in you, fully formed, and everybody around you is describing somebody else entirely.

Say what the gap costs, and be exact about it

What costs him is not the paragraph. Everybody has a Saturday and most people have several.

What costs him is that the paragraph arrived complete. It was not built; it was already there, which means there is a factory somewhere in him producing that material, and he has been walking around all these years with a factory and a reputation at the same time.

It costs him the compliment now. He cannot receive one. Somebody says kind and he thinks of a green coat, and there is nowhere to put that at coffee after a service.

And it costs him a fear he has never said out loud: that the kindness is the performance and the paragraph is the man.

You have been carrying a gap between the reputation and the two seconds, and God has never once been shown only the outside of you. Psalm 139:2 says He understands your thought from far off, which is not a comfortable verse, and His Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it in a parking lot on Saturday at half past ten. He got the whole paragraph and He did not step back from you.

In me dwells no good thing, and why that is the good news

There is one line built for a man who has just met his own factory.

For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh,) dwells no good thing.Romans 7:18

That is written by the apostle Paul, at the height of his usefulness, about himself, in the present tense. Not about his past. Not about people who have not yet grown. About what is in him, now, while he is writing Scripture.

Which means the discovery on Saturday was not a discovery about this man specifically. It was a discovery of the standard condition, arrived at late, in a parking lot, and the same Spirit is the one who makes that land as relief rather than as confirmation of the worst.

You have found out what was always true, and the finding out does not change one thing about what God does through you. That is not a way of excusing contempt. The written word makes the emptiness a settled fact and then spends the next chapter on what runs anyway, and the Spirit is the one who was helping a woman with a cart four minutes after the paragraph.

And I want to say the plain thing, because the wrong comfort would ruin it. The relief here is not that you are a good man underneath and Saturday was uncharacteristic. Romans 7:18 says there is no good thing in there and that is the verse. The relief is that the kindness was never coming from the place the paragraph came from, so the paragraph does not disprove it.

Which one is the man

The fear here is exact and it is the whole obstacle.

The fear is that the paragraph is the truth and the kindness is the cover story. That everybody who loves him has met the front of a building and there is nothing behind it.

You are not the paragraph, and a man is not most truly whatever is worst in him. Romans 8:9 says you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit if the Spirit of God dwells in you, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes dwells a word about who lives there rather than about what visits.

One plain sentence before we go on. If Saturday has opened something heavier, if there are hours where carrying on is genuinely a question, please tell one real human being today, and if it is urgent, call your doctor or a crisis line before anybody at church. That is not the kindness failing. That is God sending help with a face on it, and reaching for it is obedience rather than collapse.