Two Junctions Past Your Own Turning

It was twenty past eight on a Sunday morning and the road was empty, which is the only reason it was possible.

He knows that stretch better than any road in his life. He could drive it with his eyes shut. Left at the garage, past the school, and the turning for the building is the second one after the bridge, and he has taken it something like nine hundred times.

And that morning he went past it.

Not because he missed it. He saw it come up and he saw it go by, and his hands did not move, and he sat there watching the wheel do nothing.

He went two junctions further. About four minutes, he thinks, though he has never been able to be certain, and it has bothered him that he does not know exactly how long. At the second one he came off, went around the roundabout twice, came back on the other side, drove back, took the turning, parked in his usual space, and was inside at four minutes to nine, which is earlier than most weeks.

He led the whole morning. Two people said it was the best they had heard him. One of them meant it.

And in eleven months he has not said one word about those four minutes to anybody. Not to his wife. Not to the friend he tells everything to, because the friend is in the building. It went in the drawer where the fuse wire goes, and it has been growing quietly ever since, the way a thing does when the only voice it ever hears is yours.

Because here is what he decided about himself on the way back around that roundabout, and he decided it fast, and he has not revisited it once: a man whose hands do not turn the wheel is a man who has already gone.

Eleven months of that. Under everything. While he did the visits and took the calls and stood at the front and meant it.

Now that is you on the roundabout, and you have known it was you since about the fourth line.

Nobody is going to argue with you here

Let me tell you what is not going to happen on this page, because you are braced for both of them.

Nobody is going to talk you into staying. Not by encouragement, not by guilt, not by a story about a man who nearly walked and is so grateful now. And nobody is going to tell you to go, because that is not mine to say, I do not know your road or your years, and honestly both of those are just different ways of making a very tired man carry a decision this morning.

There is no decision on this page. Put it down for twenty minutes. It will still be there.

There is nothing to do here either. No practice to fix, nothing to get up earlier for, no discipline to add. You are running on empty, and the last thing empty needs is a suggestion.

What I want is to take one specific weight off you, and it is this one: the idea that four minutes of road settled something about you.

So look at a man in the Word who went a great deal further than two junctions, out loud, in writing, and stayed.

He was a prophet, and he had been at it for years, and he had been beaten and put in the stocks for it by somebody in his own religious establishment. And this is what he wrote down, and it survived, and it is in your Bible:

If I say, "I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name," there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.Jeremiah 20:9

Read the first half of that sentence again, because everybody quotes the second half.

If I say I will not speak any more in his name.

He said it. That is a man announcing that he is finished, in the pages of Scripture, in the first person, and God did not strike it out of the book. It is still there. It is there on purpose.

God preserved a prophet's resignation speech in His own word, which tells you exactly how He feels about a tired man's four minutes. He kept it. He did not sanitize the record. And it is the Holy Spirit, not this page, who takes a line written by a man in the stocks twenty-six centuries ago and lays it over a roundabout on a Sunday morning.

And notice what happened next, which is nothing.

There is no rebuke in that chapter. Jeremiah is not demoted, not replaced, not sat down and asked to explain himself. He is not told that a real prophet does not talk like that. The chapter ends and the book carries straight on, and he is still the one carrying it in chapter twenty-one, and in chapter thirty-one he writes some of the most beautiful sentences anybody has ever written about the mercy of God.

Your hands not moving on that wheel was your body telling the truth about how tired you are, and God is not offended by a true report. It is written that He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust (Psalm 103:14), and remembers there is tender and not disappointed. His Spirit is what makes that a hand on a shoulder rather than a fact about ancient Hebrew.

Now the part you have been doing to yourself, which is worse than the four minutes.

You have been the prosecution, the judge and the only witness for eleven months, and every one of those has been you, on empty, alone in a car. There has been no defense, because there is nobody in the room. And a court like that only ever returns one verdict.

That court has no standing, and heaven has never once read out its verdict. It is written that there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:1), and the word that matters in it is now, not later and not once you have got yourself sorted out. The Holy Spirit is the one who reads a sentence like that into a man's own car on a Sunday.

And I need to say this next part straight, because it matters more than anything else here. If any of it has gone further than tiredness, if you have found yourself thinking that everybody would manage better without you in the world at all, please tell a human being today. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour. Anywhere else, your local crisis line or emergency number, and one person who knows your name and will sit with you. Being the man who always answers the phone does not disqualify you from picking one up. It is the most ordinary and the most honest thing a person can do.