Ten Minutes in the Driveway

Nando parks at twenty past six and goes in at half past.

Ten minutes. Every night. Engine off, radio off, keys still in his hand because putting them in his pocket would be a kind of commitment. He sits there and he goes through the day, and he finds the parts of it he is not proud of, and he says them, quietly, out loud, to God, before he gets out of the car.

He would tell you it is a good habit. And in one way it is: a man who examines his own day is not a careless man.

But watch what it actually is, because his daughter worked it out before he did.

Lucia is nine. She comes out one Thursday in her socks, which she is not supposed to do, and she opens the passenger door and climbs in and pulls it shut like she is settling in for a journey.

"Everyone's inside," she says.

"I know, mija. One minute."

"You always say one minute."

He laughs. She does not. She is looking at the house through the windshield with her arms folded, the way her grandmother does.

Then she says, "Are you in trouble?"

And Nando says no, of course not, why would you ask that.

And Lucia says, "Because you sit out here like when I have to sit outside the office."

And that is the sentence that gets him, because he has been calling it prayer, and a nine-year-old has just named it as waiting to be seen by somebody who might be angry.

Then she says the second thing, which she does not know is the whole gospel, and she says it in the bored voice of a child who wants her dinner.

"Nobody's mad, Papi. Abuela's mad the food is cold. That's different."

Now maybe you have never sat in a car in your own driveway. But you know the pause.

It is the twenty seconds before you pray, where you get yourself into a fit state first. It is the Sunday morning where you cannot join in until you have done a quick internal sweep. It is the fact that you have never once in your life come to God straight in, the way you would come into your own kitchen, without an adjustment somewhere in the doorway.

You are not doing it because you are proud. You are doing it because somewhere along the line you understood that the door has an inspection at it, and a person who is not sure they will pass an inspection will always stand outside it a little longer.

Let me tell you what the Spirit of God actually put in your mouth.

The word He gave you is a family word

Paul writes a line to the Romans that has a sound in it, and the sound is the argument.

For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, Abba! Father!Romans 8:15

Abba. It is not a formal word. It is the word a child uses in a doorway with their shoes half off. It survived untranslated into a Greek letter to a Roman church because the sound of it was doing something no translation could do.

And look at what Paul says it is evidence of. Not of how well the day went. Not of the thoroughness of the driveway inventory. It is evidence that you were adopted, and that the Spirit Himself is the one who put the word in your mouth in the first place.

So hear this over you, right now, before you have tidied anything. You have received a spirit of adoption and not a spirit of slavery, and the fear you feel at the door is not the house's rule, it is a leftover from a house you no longer live in. That is written, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who supplies both the word and the confidence to use it, which means the very ability you have to call Him Father is proof of the thing you are standing outside doubting.

Now I want to say the tender part, because a man like Nando needs it said plainly and nobody says it to him.

Examining your day is not the problem. Refusing to come in until the examination is complete is the problem.

The one turns into the other so gradually that you never notice the crossing. It starts as honesty. It becomes a toll gate. And after a few years you have a private rule that God is available to you only once you have preprocessed yourself, which means the moments you most need Him, the ones where you cannot get yourself sorted, are precisely the moments you stay in the car.

That is exactly backwards, and Scripture never once asks it of you.

You are welcome in the house in the state you are in tonight. Not tolerated. Welcome, which is a word about the host and not about the guest. The Word says we may come with confidence to the throne of grace so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need, and mercy is not the thing you qualify for after the sweep. It is the thing you come in the door to get.

There was a man five hundred years ago who spent his life terrified of a Father he had only ever been shown as a Judge, and who discovered, late and all at once, that the Judge was the Father, and that the door had been standing open the whole time he had been out in the yard preparing his speech. He did not become careless. He became a son, and he wrote songs about it for the rest of his life.

You are in that same doorway, and the light is coming out of it onto the drive right now, and the Spirit who taught you the word Abba did not teach it to you so you could say it from the car.