An Hour Each Way and Nothing in It

She worked it out on a Sunday, which was a mistake.

An hour each way, five days, forty-six working weeks. Four hundred and sixty hours. Which is, and she did this bit twice because she did not believe it, more than nineteen full days a year sitting in a car on the same eleven miles of road.

Nineteen days. Not of driving somewhere. Of getting to work and getting back.

She has tried to make it useful. Podcasts, which she stopped hearing about four minutes in. A language app, twice. Phone calls to her mother, which are lovely and which her mother finds odd because there is always traffic noise.

Mostly it is nothing. Radio, the same junction, the same badly timed lights, and a low simmering resentment that has become so ordinary she does not notice it any more except when somebody cuts in.

And what has grown out of nineteen days a year is a sense that a slice of her actual life is being deducted, annually, and that whatever her life is, it is not happening on the A road.

That is your car. That is your nineteen days. And I want to speak into that, because there is a psalm with a strange verb in it that has your commute inside it.

He is acquainted with the path

David is describing how thoroughly God knows him, and in the middle of it he uses a word about routes.

Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways.Psalm 139:3

Thou compassest my path.

The word behind compassest is about sifting or winnowing, and behind that, encircling: measuring something out, going round it, examining it closely. He is saying that God has been over his route, in detail.

And then: acquainted with all my ways. Not aware of. Acquainted, the word you use for knowing a person. He is on familiar terms with the paths themselves.

Which puts God on first name terms with eleven miles of A road, two badly timed lights and a junction you could describe with your eyes shut.

You are traveling a road He is acquainted with. Not enduring nineteen days that nobody is in. The written word makes your route itself something God knows closely, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a woman at the same set of lights at ten past eight.

Now let me say something about the resentment, because you have started to be embarrassed by it.

Two hours a day is a genuine cost. It is not ingratitude to notice that, and there is nothing spiritually wrong with a woman who finds a commute wearing. That is a real burden and it is right to call it one.

You are not wrong to feel the weight of it. The written word never asks you to enjoy a hardship in order to have God in it. The Holy Spirit is in that car with the resentment and does not require you to talk yourself out of it first.

And now the deduction, which is the belief doing the actual harm.

Nineteen days subtracted from my life. Look at what that assumes: that life is what happens in the destinations, and that the moving between them is a gap. On that accounting most of anybody's life is a gap.

You are not losing those hours. Thou compassest my path, and the path is the thing being measured out. The Holy Spirit has been in every one of those hours, and none of them have been unattended.