I Dread The Drive More Than The Day

You have said it out loud exactly once, and the person laughed.

Not unkindly. They thought you were making a joke about traffic. So you let it be a joke about traffic, and you have not said it since, and you have carried it privately for about six years now.

The day is fine. That is the strange part. You arrive, you get through it, there are stretches of it you genuinely like. Nobody watching would describe you as a man having a hard time.

It is the four hours before.

Something happens somewhere around the second hour. The road goes quiet, the light starts to go, and the inside of the car turns into a room where every conversation you have ever had with these people plays at once. By the time you come off the highway you have already had three arguments, apologized in your head for something from eleven years ago, and worked out precisely what you should have said in a kitchen in a house that has since been sold.

And then you park, and you take a breath, and you go in, and you are perfectly pleasant. And you are also completely used up before the door opens.

I want to say the thing you may have been waiting a while to hear. A fear does not have to be about the biggest thing in the room to be real. Sometimes the drive gets it all, because the drive is the only part of the day where nobody needs anything from you and there is nowhere to put your hands.

My presence shall go with thee

There is a moment where Moses refuses to move without something, and God answers him with one sentence about journeys.

And he said, My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest. (Exodus 33:14, King James Version)

Two things in one line, and the second one is the one nobody quotes.

The presence, first. Not a destination and not an outcome. Company. God does not answer the question about where they are going; He answers the question about who is going with them.

And then rest, which is the strange word to find attached to a journey. Rest is what you get at the end of one. Here it is being handed to a man who has not left yet, about the road itself.

You are accompanied in the part of this that nobody sees, and the written word attaches the promise of rest to the journey rather than to the arrival. Exodus 33:14 gives a man presence and rest before he has moved one step, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that something a man can feel in a car rather than a sentence he can quote.

That is the ground. Now the part that speaks to your particular four hours.

You have never once been alone in that car, and Scripture puts God's presence on the road rather than only in the room at the end of it. Exodus 33:14 was spoken to somebody about to travel, and the Spirit of God is the one who is actually there in the second hour when the light goes.

What the drive is carrying

Here is what I think is happening in your car, and it is not morbidity.

The day gives you jobs. There are people to greet, things to carry, a conversation to keep moving, somebody to help. Jobs are enormously protective. A man with something to do is a man whose mind is occupied, and a mind stays well away from the eleven year old kitchen while its owner is carrying a box in from a vehicle.

The drive has no jobs. It has one job, which is the road, and the road takes about eight percent of you. The other ninety two percent goes looking for something to work on, and it knows exactly where the unfinished things are stored.

You were never doing this because something is wrong with you, and the written word has a man asking for company before he will take one step down a road. Exodus 33:14 treats that request as entirely reasonable and answers it directly, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a man from calling his own mind an enemy.

And here is the second thing, which matters more. Every one of those imagined conversations ends badly. Have you noticed? Not one of them, in six years, has ever ended with everyone understanding each other. That is not because the people are impossible. It is because you are writing both parts, and the version of them you write is assembled entirely out of the worst three minutes you have ever had with them.

You are not rehearsing your family. You are rehearsing an edited highlight reel of everything that ever went wrong, at seventy miles an hour, in the dark.

You have been arguing with somebody who is not in the car, and Scripture does not have one story in it where a man is helped by a conversation he invented. Exodus 33:14 offers presence, which is an actual person actually there, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present in the second hour whether the argument is running or not.

One decision about the road

So here is what I want you to do, and notice that it is about the drive and not about the day.

Six years have gone on preparing for the day, which was never the problem. Leave the day alone. It is fine and it is the part that gets handled well.

Decide one thing about the journey.

I am not going to tell you what. I do not know your road, your obligations, who is in the car with you or what is possible. But it is one decision, it is yours, and it has to be made before you set off rather than at hour two when the light is going.

Some men decide the last half hour is silent. Some decide they will stop somewhere, once, and stand outside the car for four minutes. Some decide that the argument gets a name out loud when it starts, which sounds strange and takes the legs off it. Some decide who they will call from a parking area at the halfway point.

You are able to make one decision about a road, and it is written into Exodus 33:14 that the rest was promised about the going rather than the getting there. The Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man deciding a small true thing at a table days before he turns a key.

And I want you to see what one decision does that six years of enduring never did. It makes the drive a thing you are doing rather than a thing happening to you. Same road, same hours, same weather. Entirely different position to be in.

You were made able to enter a hard stretch on purpose, and the written word puts a man on a road with company rather than sending him down it alone to manage. Exodus 33:14 says I will give thee rest about the journey itself, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes rest on a highway a real category rather than a poetic one.