Eleven Years In The Car

The car is where you pray about it. It has been for eleven years and you have never once questioned that.

Twenty minutes each way, radio off, out loud, honest in a way you are not honest anywhere else.

And you have never prayed about your marriage inside your own house. Not once. Not upstairs, not in the kitchen, not sitting in the front room at eleven at night when everybody has gone up.

Eleven years of a promise held and prayed about entirely outside the building it is being kept in. Which is strange, because you are not a private person about God. You pray at church, you pray with your children, you have prayed out loud in other people's homes.

Just not in yours, about this.

Let me name what I think is going on, and then let me do something about it, because eleven years is a long time to keep the most honest part of your life in a vehicle.

Not far from every one of us

There is a line in Acts, said by a man standing in front of a hostile crowd in a foreign city, and the geography in it is the point.

though he be not far from every one of us (Acts 17:27, King James Version)

Not far. From every one of us. That is a claim about distance and it applies to everybody in the hearing of it.

He is saying it to people who have never heard of him, in a city full of altars to things he does not believe in, and he does not carve out any exceptions.

You are not far from Him in any room in that house, and Acts 17 has never once made a location the thing that changes the distance. Acts 17:27 says he is not far from every one of us with no exceptions attached, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that true of a kitchen at eleven at night.

That is what dismantles the car. The car is not closer. It feels closer, because it is a place where nobody can see you and nothing in it is part of the marriage.

You have been choosing a room by how safe it feels rather than by where He is, and the word has never once measured the distance that way. The passage puts the nearness at every one of us with no location specified, and the Spirit of God is the one who is as near in a hallway as in a parked car.

Why the house is harder

Let me be honest about the mechanism, because the mechanism is not shameful and naming it takes most of its power.

The car is neutral ground. Nothing in it has happened. No conversation in that car has gone wrong and no silence in it has lasted a decade.

The house is where everything is. The room you argued in. The chair he sits in. The hall where you had the conversation about your mother. To pray about the marriage in the house is to pray in the presence of the evidence.

You are as near to Him standing beside that chair as you have ever been on a drive to work, and Acts 17 has never once carved out a room. Acts 17:27 says he is not far from every one of us with no exceptions listed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is already standing where a woman has not spoken.

That is not cowardice. That is a very ordinary human preference for saying hard things somewhere that has no history attached to it.

But the effect is that God has been given the neutral ground and your house has not had one honest sentence said in it about the thing that matters most in it.

You are able to say it where the evidence is, and it has never once been necessary to find neutral ground first. Acts 17:27 puts Him not far from everybody in every place, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is standing in a room where things have gone wrong.

You made a promise inside that house and He was a party to it there, and the covenant has never once needed a neutral location. It is written that He is not far from every one of us, and the Spirit of God is the one who is in the room with the chair and the hall and the history.

One sentence, indoors

Here is the assignment and the whole of it is the location.

Say one sentence of prayer out loud about the marriage, in the room where the two of you actually live.

It is written that He is not far from every one of us, and the Spirit of God is the one who was in that hallway for the whole eleven years. You are speaking into a room that has never been empty, and the distance has never once been what the car was solving.

Not in the car. Not this once. Indoors, in the room, with the history right there.

Something like: God, I have been doing this in the car for eleven years, and this marriage belongs to You, and I am saying it in here.

Out loud, when he is not in. It will feel more exposed than the car and that is the point of it rather than a problem with it.

You are able to say the honest thing in the room with the history in it, and it has never once been the neutral ground that made it hearable. Acts 17:27 removes the distance everywhere at once, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a front room when eleven years of car prayers finally come indoors.