I Drive The Van

Wednesday night, twenty past seven, and he is in the driver's seat in a parking lot with the engine off and a paperback in the door pocket he has been reading for four months at the rate of eleven pages a week.

The van is empty and warm and smells the way a church van smells, which is a smell nobody has ever successfully described.

He has just brought nine people. Two of them cannot drive at night anymore. One does not drive at all and never has. A woman of about forty who is going through something and who talks the whole way there and nothing at all on the way back, which he has learned not to mind and not to comment on. Two teenagers who get picked up from a street where their mother would rather they were not walking after dark.

Without that van, four of those nine would not be in the building. That is a fact, and he knows it, and it is worth something.

Twelve years he has done this.

He has the license. He is the only one in that church with the license, which is a boring administrative fact that has shaped a decade of his life.

And here is the thing he has never said, and it is very simple and it sounds so small that he cannot imagine how to say it without being told he is being ridiculous.

He has never been in the room.

Twelve years of Wednesday nights and he has sat in the lot for every single one of them, because the run takes forty minutes and the meeting is ninety and it is not worth going in for the middle of it and everybody agrees about that including him. He knows what the group is about from what people say in the van. He has been driving people to a thing he has never once attended.

Where this is not going

Let me say it up front, because you are the kind of man who checks the road ahead.

Nothing on this page is going to tell you to stop driving, hand it over, raise it with anybody, or ask for anything. Not tonight and not by suggestion at the end. Nobody here can see your church, or the two teenagers, or whether anybody else could get that license, and a page that cannot see those things has no business steering you.

And it is not going to tell you what you should be doing instead. There is no list at the bottom and no exercise coming.

You are not being aimed anywhere, and there is nothing about this you have to settle tonight. That is not me being careful with you. Scripture is what makes room for a man to say the plain thing before any decision, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a man to have a plan before He would sit in a van with him.

Gifts differing, and the word is deliberate

Here is the verse I want on the dashboard, and it is one word in it that matters.

Having then gifts differing according to the grace that is given to us, let us wait on our ministering.Romans 12:6-7

Differing. Not ranked. Not distributed by importance. Differing, which means the differences are the design and not a problem to be managed.

And then the practical instruction: let us wait on our ministering. Do the one that is yours.

Which is a good and clean sentence, and here is why it matters for a man in a parking lot. Paul is entirely comfortable with the idea that different people are doing different things and that this is right. He is not comfortable with the idea that a person could be permanently outside the life of the body in order to serve it. The whole passage is about members functioning together, in the same paragraph, in the same room.

You are allowed to notice that the way this has been arranged has kept you outside twelve years of something, and noticing is not the same as complaining about a single person. I am not stretching that. Romans 12:6 assumes differing parts inside one shared life, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and makes it land on a man with a paperback in a door pocket.

Small is not the same as unimportant

Now the thing that has kept you quiet, said out loud.

You have not said it because it sounds trivial. Twelve years of Wednesdays and the complaint amounts to: I would like to have been in the room. Said out loud in a men's group it would get a joke and a shoulder clap and the conversation would move on, and you would feel exactly as unheard as before but now with a witness.

So you have kept it, and it has quietly accumulated, the way small things do when they happen six hundred times.

Six hundred Wednesdays is not a small thing. That is the arithmetic nobody has done, including you.

You have not been making a fuss about nothing, you have been six hundred times in a parking lot and have never once counted it up. The word treats a man's part in the body as something lived among people rather than delivered to them from outside, and the Spirit who searches all things has been in the van with you for every one of those Wednesdays.

And the thing that has cost the most

Here is the deeper part, and it is not about the van.

For years there has been a plain fact about your Wednesdays that has never been said to God out loud. Not out of rebellion. Because it sounded too small to bring, and a man does not take God something he is embarrassed to have minded.

Which means twelve years of it have been carried and never handed over, and that costs a great deal more than the driving does.

He has known since about the fourth year. Nothing you say tonight will be news.

You are welcome to bring Him a thing you think is too small to mention, and He has never once required a man to have a serious enough grievance before He would listen. The word is full of people saying flat, ordinary, unimpressive things to God without polishing them, and the Spirit who was given to help us is not sitting there ranking your complaint.