The Twenty Minutes Between There And Home

There is a stretch of road between the church and her house that takes twenty minutes, and she has not remembered driving it in about four years.

She knows she drives it. The car is on the drive when she gets out of it. The indicator has been used, because the neighbor across the way has never once come out to say anything about her driving, and he would. Somewhere in those twenty minutes she has stopped at two sets of lights and given way at the roundabout by the garage and probably let somebody out of the supermarket exit, because she always does. All of it happened. None of it is in her.

She sat in the car on the drive one Sunday with the engine off and tried, as an experiment, to remember one single face from that morning.

Not a name. She has the names. She could give you eighty of them in order of where they sit. She wanted a face, the way you remember a face when somebody has actually looked at you, and she could not produce one. There had been a hundred and forty people in that room and she had stood in front of them for thirty five minutes and shaken most of their hands afterwards, and by four in the afternoon the entire morning had the texture of a room she had once walked through on the way to somewhere else.

She did not cry about it. That is the part worth noticing. Four years ago it would have frightened her enough to cry. Now it was simply a fact she checked, the way you check the oil.

Then she went in and put the oven on and asked her family how their day had been, and listened to the answers, and could not have repeated one of them either.

Here is what she has decided about that, quietly, over four years, without ever saying it out loud to a living soul. She has decided that the blankness is a report on her. That it means the thing that used to be there has gone, and gone because of something she did or stopped doing, and that if she were the person she was at twenty six the road home would still have something in it.

That is what she believes on a Sunday afternoon, and it is not true, and I want to take it off her.

The verb is His and it always was

Everybody knows the second verse of Psalm 23 well enough to say it at a funeral. Very few people have ever been shown what kind of sentence it is.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.Psalm 23:2

Read the verbs. Not one of them belongs to the sheep.

He makes. He leads. The sheep in that sentence has no assignment whatsoever. It does not find the pasture, it does not test the water, it does not decide when it has done enough walking to deserve the grass. It lies down because it has been made to lie down by somebody who could see it needed to and did not wait to be asked.

That is a causative verb, and it is doing all the work in the psalm. And the man who wrote it had been on both sides of it. David had been the one out on the hillside doing the making and the leading, and he still wrote it from the grass.

So hear this, before anything else in this message: you are not the source of Sunday morning and you never have been. Not once, not in the good years, not in the year you would call your best. I am not handing you my opinion about that. I am handing you what God already said about who makes the green in Psalm 23, and it is His Spirit and not my sentence that makes a line like that land in a person who has been carrying the opposite for four years.

Now look at what that does to the twenty minutes.

If the morning was something you generated, then an empty drive home is a fuel gauge, and a low gauge is a verdict. But if the green was His making and the water was His leading, then what was in that room this morning did not come out of your reserves at all. It came through you. And a channel is not diminished by what passes through it. A channel is only ever wet.

You are not running out. You are tired, which is a completely different thing and has never once been a sin. That is not a kind opinion I am offering you. It is what His word does with tiredness everywhere tiredness appears in it, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes that off a page and puts it where you can feel the weight come off.

There is a habit that grows in people who carry other people, and it is worth naming plainly because it hides so well. The habit is reading your own emptiness as evidence. You feel nothing on the drive home, so you conclude something about your calling. You cannot remember a face, so you conclude something about your love. That reasoning feels rigorous. It is actually just tiredness holding the pen, and tiredness has never been a reliable narrator of anything. Nowhere in His word does God read a person's fatigue as a report on their calling, and the Holy Spirit has never once agreed with a verdict Scripture did not hand down.

And here is the thing about that habit: it is already broken over you. Right now, in the chair you are sitting in, your emptiness has no authority to testify about your calling, because God has never once made a person's usefulness contingent on how a Sunday afternoon feels. That is not my encouragement talking. That is what His word settles in 1 Kings 19, where the man who saw fire fall on Carmel was flat on his face under a tree the following week and was not rebuked for it once, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence like that off a page and puts it inside a person.

Look at what happened under that tree, actually, because it is one of the most tender scenes in the Bible and it is almost always taught as a failure.

A man ran out. Completely. He asked to die. And the response from heaven was not a lecture and not a strategy. It was sleep, and then food, and then more sleep, and then more food, and only after all of that, a conversation. Nobody said, you of all people. Nobody asked what had gone wrong in his devotional life. The angel touched him and said the journey is too great for thee, which is a sentence God says about tiredness and not about weakness.

The journey is too great for thee. He knows. He has always known. He said it first.

So let me say the plain thing to you now, and let it be as plain as it sounds. You are being led right now. Not when you feel it. Now, on a Sunday afternoon with the oven on and nothing in you, because leading is something the Shepherd does and not something you have to be awake enough to receive. His word says he leadeth, in the present tense, with no clause attached about the condition of the sheep, and His Spirit is the one who makes that word alive in a room instead of merely accurate.

And one more, because this is the one I most want you to hold. What you gave this morning was real. It landed. It did work in people you will hear about in ten years and some you never will, and the fact that none of it came home with you in the car is not a leak in the system. It is how a channel behaves. You were not built to keep it. You were built to carry it, and you did. His word promised living water flowing out of a person and never once promised anybody a reservoir, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the flowing, this morning and every morning you cannot remember.

I want to say one more thing gently before we go on, because it belongs in any message written to someone this tired. If the flatness has gone past tiredness lately, if there have been thoughts on that road home you would not repeat to anyone, please do not sit alone with that tonight. In the United States you can call or text 988. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one actual human being who can sit with you before you sleep. That is not a failure of calling. That is the food and the sleep under the tree, and God is the one who arranged them.