The Timing We Both Perfected

He has got it down to about forty seconds now, and he is not proud of this.

The drive is shared. Two houses, one strip of tarmac, four feet between his car door and the other man's. In nine years they have said perhaps twenty sentences to each other, and eighteen of them were about a wheelie bin.

Somewhere in year three, the avoidance started, and neither of them decided it.

He hears the other front door and waits. He counts. He gives it a minute, then goes out. If they both arrive home at once he takes his time with his seatbelt, with his phone, with a coat that does not need adjusting, until the other man is inside. And the other man does exactly the same thing, because our reader has sat in his own car and watched him do it in a wing mirror.

Two grown men, four feet apart, both hiding in their own vehicles until the other one goes in.

He worked out last week roughly how much of his life this has taken. Not a huge amount of time. But an enormous amount of attention, every single day, for six years, and it landed on him properly: he has been spending real effort on not meeting a man who lives four feet away.

That is your drive. That is your wing mirror. And I want to talk to you about seasons, because the one you think you missed is not the kind that closes.

The season is a kind, not a deadline

There is a passage everybody knows and almost nobody applies to a driveway.

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven... a time to keep silence, and a time to speak.Ecclesiastes 3:1,7

Notice what kind of thing a season is. It is not an appointment. It is not a window with a shutter that comes down. A season is a sort of time, a period that comes round, and the whole point of the passage is that both kinds are legitimate and both keep arriving.

You have had six years of keeping silence. That was a season, and it was allowed, and there is no verse that condemns it.

But a season is not a sentence. The other one keeps coming round, and it came round this week, which is precisely why you sat in the car and did that arithmetic instead of just reaching for the seatbelt.

You have arrived at a time to speak. Not missed one six years ago. Arrived at one, now, this week, which is what the stirring in the car actually was. The written word gives both kinds of season and keeps handing them out, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a man in a driveway rather than leaving it as a poem people read at funerals.

Now let me take the absurdity out of it, because I know how ridiculous the avoidance feels from the inside.

It is not ridiculous. It is what two courteous men do when neither wants to impose and both have left it slightly too long: they each construct a small system to spare the other an awkward moment, and the systems interlock, and the result looks from the outside like dislike and is actually two people being considerate at each other for six years.

You are not in a quarrel. The written word makes silence a season rather than a verdict, and there is no falling out anywhere in this story. The Holy Spirit has had two decent men four feet apart for nine years, and He has not been waiting for either of them to repent of anything.

And here is the practical shape of it, because it is smaller than the arithmetic suggests.

You do not need an occasion. You need to not do the forty seconds. That is all. Get out of the car when you arrive instead of waiting, and say morning in a normal voice, and get on with unloading the boot. He will say it back. That is very probably the entire event.

You have the ordinary version available today. A time to speak does not specify a subject. The Holy Spirit gives courage for a single word at a normal volume, and a single word at a normal volume is what ends a six-year system.