Ten Minutes In The Parking Lot

Nadine gets there at ten past seven, which is eighteen minutes early, and she has worked that timing out over three years the way other people work out a route to avoid the lights.

She parks in the third row, against the fence, under the security light that has been broken since before she started coming, which is the point of that space. The engine ticks as it cools. She puts her keys in her lap and she waits.

She watches the others go in. She knows all of them by the way they walk. The couple who always arrive arguing quietly and stop at the door. The two sisters who come together and stand outside talking for six or seven minutes before either of them goes in.

At twenty past, the first song starts, and she can feel the bass through the fence more than she can hear it. That is the part she likes best, if she is honest. The song from outside.

At about the second verse the lights inside go down, and the windows change from yellow to something softer, and that is when Nadine gets out of the car.

She has reasons. She has good ones and she is not going to be talked out of them.

Eleven years ago in that building she cried in front of about forty people. It was not dramatic and nobody was cruel and several were kind, and it was the worst twenty minutes of her adult life, and there is a part of her that has been standing in the parking lot ever since. And two years ago her husband stopped coming and everybody knows, and being seen means being asked, and being asked means saying the same sentence eleven times before the coffee is out.

So she goes in at the second song and sits on the back left, three seats along from the fire exit, and she sings, and she means it, and she leaves during the last chorus.

Here is what she does not know.

Terence has been on the door for four years. He noticed, some time in the first winter, that a woman comes in at the second song and that the main door makes a noise like a gunshot when it swings shut on its arm.

So he props the side door. Every week. He wedges it with a bit of wood he keeps behind the bulletin board, and then he stands where he cannot see who comes through it, and at half past he takes the wedge out.

He has never mentioned it to her. He has never mentioned it to anybody. If you asked him about it he would probably say something about the heat.

Read what He was actually doing when He looked around

There is a scene in Mark that gets preached as an exposure and it is not one.

A woman who had been ill twelve years came up behind Jesus in a crowd. Behind is not an accident. Every single thing about her approach was engineered so that there would not be a scene: from the back, through a throng, touching the hem, which is the least of Him she could possibly reach.

And then He stopped and asked who touched Him, and the disciples said the sensible thing, which is that everybody is touching You, look at the crowd.

Then this.

And he looked round about to see her that had done this thing.Mark 5:32

Read the object of that verb. He looked round about to see her. Not to find who did it. Not to identify the offender. To see her. He was looking for a face.

And when He found the face, hear what He actually said, because this is the hinge of the whole thing. Daughter. That was the first word. He did not describe her condition to the crowd. He did not narrate twelve years of anything to anybody. He gave her a family word in front of a street full of strangers and let that be the loudest thing anybody heard.

You are the one He is looking around for, and He is not looking in order to expose you. Mark 5:32 records the verb before it records anything she said, and the written word puts His looking first on purpose. The Spirit is not in the dragging out business. He sets a written line down beside a woman in a parked car, quietly, with the engine ticking.

That crowd, by the way, learned almost nothing about her. They learned that somebody had been well received. Everything that mattered happened between two faces in the middle of a lot of noise.

You have been seen already, and the seeing cost you nothing at all. Scripture puts the whole transaction in His hands, from the looking to the naming, and His Spirit is not asking you to arrange anything to make it true.

Being seen and being looked at were never the same thing

I want to separate two words that have been jammed together in you, probably for years.

Being looked at is a room's activity. It is faces turning. It is the pause when you walk in, and the question that comes with a hand on your arm, and the eleven repetitions of the same sentence before the coffee is out. It costs something, and you are not wrong to have worked out a timing around it.

Being seen is His activity. It happens without the room's cooperation and without the room's knowledge, and it does not need a single light switched on over you to be complete.

You have reasons for the back row. Real ones. Some people were burned in a room like that one and the burn was administered with total kindness, which somehow makes it stay longer. Some people are exhausted by being asked. Some people are in the middle of something they are not ready to make into a story yet, and are entirely right not to. And some people simply do not want to, and not wanting to is a whole reason on its own and does not require a supporting document.

Nobody here is going to ask you to come forward. Nobody is going to suggest sitting nearer the front, raising a hand, joining a thing, telling your story, staying for the coffee or arriving at ten past. This is not the article where the back row gets gently corrected.

You are lit in the back row three seats from the fire exit, and no room has to notice for that to be so. Matthew 5:14 hands out that fact without a seating plan attached, the written word never once conditions it on visibility, and the Spirit says it again over a woman who leaves during the last chorus.

And the timing you worked out over three years is not cowardice. It is a person managing a real cost with the resources she actually has, which is what wisdom looks like from the inside.

You were seen before you walked in, and the seeing was finished out in the parking lot. That is what Mark 5:32 puts on record: He looked, and He found her, and the finding was His work from start to end. What the Spirit adds is that the same thing has already happened at ten past seven in a car against a fence.