It Only Goes Off in the Rain

The car alarm on Fairlawn Road goes off at four in the morning, and for two months the whole street assumed the worst.

Everybody had a theory. Somebody said kids. Somebody else said the fox that lives behind the bins, which would be an impressively strong fox. Marion at number twelve, who has views, said she had seen a man in a gray coat, which turned out to be the postman, at a completely different time of day, in a different month.

It went off eleven times. And every single time, one of them would get up and pull the curtain back and stand there in a dressing gown looking at a silver car that nobody was touching.

Then Priya, who fixes cars for a living and had until then been staying out of it, went and had a look with a torch one Sunday and came back with the answer in about four minutes.

Water in a connector. Behind the wheel arch. A perished rubber seal about the size of a five pence piece.

"It only goes off in the rain," she said, wiping her hands. "Check the nights. Every single one of them was wet."

And somebody at the back said, well hang on, so the alarm was wrong.

And Priya said no. That is the bit I have thought about ever since.

"The alarm is not wrong. The alarm is working perfectly. It is doing exactly what it is built to do, which is fire when something changes in that circuit. It is just not reporting what you think it is reporting. It is not reporting a burglar. It is reporting rain."

Now here is why I am telling you about a car on Fairlawn Road.

Your alarm goes off at four in the afternoon. Or at eleven at night, or in that specific stretch of Sunday between lunch and dark. And when it goes, it goes with the whole thing: the kitchen, the exact wording, your sister's face, the way she went quiet instead of answering, eleven years ago, in full color, as though it happened at lunchtime.

And every time, you conclude the same thing. It came back, so it must not be dealt with. The alarm sounded, so there must be someone in the car.

I would like to introduce you to your own wiring, and then I would like to show you a verse that tells you where the thing itself actually went.

The alarm is not the evidence

David writes a line about distance that is doing something very deliberate, and it is easy to read past it because we have heard it on greetings cards.

As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us.Psalm 103:12

He could have said north and south. He did not, and the choice is not decorative.

North and south have ends. You can travel north, arrive at the top, and start going south, and the two are a measurable distance apart. East and west have no such meeting point. Go east and you keep going east forever. The two never converge, and there is no number you can put on the gap.

So David is not saying God has moved it a long way off. He is saying the distance cannot be expressed, which means it cannot be closed, which means there is no route by which the thing gets back to you.

So hear this, because your afternoon has been telling you the opposite for eleven years. You are separated from what you said in that kitchen by a distance with no number on it, and the fact that the memory reached you today does not mean the transgression did. Those are two different objects. One of them was removed. The other one is a circuit in a tired body doing exactly what tired bodies do. I am not inventing that distinction to make you feel better; the removal is written down, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a written removal and makes a person actually feel far from a thing.

Now let me name your rubber seal, because it will help you enormously to know what the weather is.

You are exhausted. That is the first one, and it is not a spiritual diagnosis, it is a physical one. A tired brain has less of whatever it is that keeps old material filed, and so old material surfaces. This is why it is four in the afternoon and not ten in the morning. It is why it is worse in February. It is why it happens on the third bad night in a row.

The second one is that you have rehearsed it. Not on purpose. But every time it has surfaced you have gone through it, examined it, tested it, and put it back, and eleven years of that has worn a track so smooth that the memory now arrives fully formed and needs no help at all.

None of that is sin. All of it is wiring.

And here is where it gets freeing. You have been treating the frequency of the alarm as a report on your standing with God, and it is not, and it never was. Scripture nowhere makes the felt quietness of your conscience the measure of your forgiveness. It makes the cross the measure, and the Spirit of God is the one who bears witness with your spirit about what that cross settled, in His own timing, and not on the schedule of your adrenal system.

You are forgiven at four in the afternoon in exactly the same way you are forgiven at ten in the morning. The distance did not shrink because you got tired.

I want to say one more thing, gently, and then we will go to the receiving part.

If you needed proof that you are not a person who does not care, the alarm is it. Eleven years. Full color. That is not the interior of somebody callous. That is a tender conscience with a perished seal in it, and God is not remotely alarmed by the noise, because He has read the report properly and knows it is reporting rain.