The Car Park I Sat In and Did Not Go In

Twice. Once in the spring and once about six weeks ago.

Both times she drove there properly, with her coat on, ten minutes early, in the way you do when you have decided. Both times she parked in the same corner, at the far end, where you can see the door and the door cannot really see you. Both times she turned the engine off.

And both times she sat there for somewhere between four and eleven minutes and then started the car and drove home.

She did not leave that church in a fight. There was no scene and nobody said anything to her. She simply stopped going, in the way people do, over about eight weeks, and by the end of it nobody rang.

It happened in the January. There was a thing that had been strongly recommended from the front, more than once, in a way she would now describe as pastoral pressure and did not have any name for at the time, and she put money in and other people put money in and it was not what it was said to be.

Nobody has ever spoken about it publicly. That is the part that keeps her in the car. Not anger about the money. The fact that a room full of people who love God went through something together and it has been handled by everybody simply going on as normal.

And so she sits in a corner of a car park with the engine off, twice in six months, and drives home.

You know that corner. Yours might be a different building or a different subject. Something happened, and it was never named, and going back in would mean walking past the place where it happened while everybody is being lovely.

Come and sit here on the wall with me instead. It is warm, and I am not going to argue you through those doors. There is one sentence about freedom I want to put in your hands.

There is no code, and there is a freedom that is indeed

Let me say the plain thing first, because the name over the door of this site promises a secret and you have had enough of things promised from a front.

There is no code. There was nothing in what was recommended, and there is no reading of it under which you missed a step.

And here is what I will not do, and I want you to see me not doing it. I am not going to give you your Sunday back by pulling that church apart. I was not there. Some of what happened may have been foolishness and some of it may have been worse, and I do not know, and neither of us is going to build anything solid on a verdict about people I have never met. Your freedom is not made out of their guilt.

Here is the sentence.

If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.John 8:36

Everything is in the last word.

Free indeed. Really free. Not free as a technicality, not free while still checking, not free in principle and captive in the car park. He puts that word on the end because He knows exactly how many kinds of small freedom people are handed.

And notice who does it. If the Son shall make you free. It is not a freedom you construct out of a satisfactory outcome. It does not require anybody in that building to admit anything, and it does not depend on the thing being publicly named, and it is not waiting on somebody to ring you.

That matters, because everything you have been waiting for is somebody else's to do, and He has arranged this so that your freedom is not.

You are not waiting on that room to acknowledge anything, and the freedom in that sentence was never issued by a congregation. That is not a comfort I have arranged on a wall. It is written into John 8, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes one word on the end of a sentence and lays it on a woman in the far corner of a car park.

You have been made free by the Son, and the word attached to it is indeed. Scripture says free indeed, and His Spirit is the one who makes a single emphatic word into something that reaches a person with the engine off.

Now let me sit in the quiet part with you, because I do not want to rush this.

You keep driving there because something in you is not finished, and it is not the money and it is not even the teaching. It is that a thing happened to a group of people and nobody has ever said out loud that it happened.

That is a real grief and it is not small. Communities do this. They close over a thing, kindly, without malice, because naming it would be painful and because everybody is tired, and the closing over is not a conspiracy, it is just what tired people do. And it leaves the ones who were most affected standing outside a wound that officially does not exist.

You are not bitter. You are unwitnessed. Those are completely different, and only one of them is a fault, and yours is not the one.

You are not carrying bitterness, and being unwitnessed by a room is not the same as being unseen. Scripture says Thou God seest me, said by a woman sitting alone by a spring in a desert after being treated badly by people who ought to have known better, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that ancient sentence and puts it in a parked car.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because two car parks do not become a doorway because a friend was gentle with you. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what sitting with the engine off never does. So speak, out loud, in the car. You have the standing to speak to a thing that has held you and tell it what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that yours by position rather than by attendance, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word much further than a windscreen.