The Conversation In The Car

The engine is off and she is still talking, and she is talking to somebody who is not in the car and has never once been in the car.

Twenty past eight in a parking lot behind the building where she works, in the space at the end that nobody wants because of the drain. Her bag is on the passenger seat with the strap still over her shoulder because she got as far as reaching for the door and then did not open it. The windshield has that fine morning film on it that the wipers only smear.

She is on the part she always gets to. Not the beginning. The part about four minutes in, where the other person has said the thing they would say, and she has the answer ready, and the answer is very good. It has been getting better for about a year. It is the most carefully made thing she owns.

She says the last line out loud. She has said that last line out loud in this parking space perhaps two hundred times.

Then she stops, and there is that half second of silence in a car that is louder than the talking was, and she picks up her bag and goes in and is completely fine all day.

Here is what she would tell you if you asked, and it would be true: she is never going to have this conversation. The person is far away, or dead, or has no idea, or would not understand, or would understand perfectly and would not care, and any of those five is enough.

Here is what she would not tell you: she thinks that if she stops rehearsing it, the thing that was done to her stops counting. That the case exists as long as she is keeping it. That her going over it every morning is the only record anywhere in the world that any of it happened, and if she puts it down, it is as though it did not.

That is you, and your parking space might be a shower, or a walk, or the fifteen minutes after everyone has gone to bed.

Two plain things before anything else, and they matter more than any teaching here. If any part of this is still happening, if somebody is frightening you or hurting you now, nothing on this page is telling you to endure it; tell one person today who can act, your doctor, a crisis line where you live, one friend who will come and sit with you. And whatever you are up against in this, it is not a person. That is not a sentence about who did what. It is a sentence about what has been sitting on your chest for a year in a car, which is not the same object as the human being it is about. Scripture is direct that the struggle is not against flesh and blood, and that is a mercy rather than a technicality.

Somebody else is already holding the case

There is a sentence in Romans that gets used badly, usually to hurry people past something, and read properly it does the exact opposite.

Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.Romans 12:19

Start with the first two words, because almost nobody does. Dearly beloved. Whatever else that sentence is, it is addressed with tenderness to somebody who has been wronged. It is not a rebuke. Nobody is being told off for minding.

Then the middle, which is the part that gets misread. Give place unto wrath. Not: there is no wrath. Not: what happened to you does not warrant any. It says there is wrath, that it is real and appropriate, and that room is to be made for it, because it belongs to somebody whose judgement is better than yours and mine.

And then the reason. Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Which means the case is not being dropped. It is being held. By somebody who was in the room when it happened, who does not need her to keep the minutes, and who has never once forgotten a detail of it.

You are not the only record of what was done to you, and the case does not stop existing when you stop rehearsing it. That is not a comfortable thing to say to a woman in a parking space: Romans 12:19 keeps the wrath and assigns it, in a sentence that opens by calling her beloved, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a released thing stay released in a body that has been keeping the file for a year rather than the amount of composure anybody can find at twenty past eight.

Handing it over is not saying it was fine

Now the fear underneath, and it deserves to be said fully.

The fear is that putting it down is the same as agreeing it did not matter. That the day she stops going over it is the day it becomes officially nothing, and that she will have been the one who let that happen, on top of everything else.

That is not what handing something to God is, and Scripture never treats it that way anywhere.

Giving place to wrath is not minimizing. It is the opposite of minimizing: it is saying the thing is so serious that it requires a court she does not have access to. Nobody is asking her to say it was fine. Nobody is asking her to forgive on a timetable, or to make contact, or to explain herself, or to feel differently by Thursday. Not one of those is in the verse and not one of them is being asked here.

You have been carrying an entire case single handed that was never yours to prosecute, and setting it down does not close it. The written word says vengeance belongs to God and calls the person carrying it dearly beloved in the same breath, and the Spirit of God is the one holding what a woman is not built to hold, never the woman's stamina.

And let me be exact about the thing that matters most on this page. Nothing about the last year is a report on how well you have handled it. If you are still angry, that is not a failure of faith and it is not a lack of faith and it is not something anybody here is going to correct. Nobody buys peace with rehearsal and nobody forfeits justice by finally sleeping. That arithmetic is not in Scripture, and where it has been implied to you, from a platform or across a kitchen table, it was implied wrongly.

You have not been sitting an examination that God has been marking in a parking lot every morning. The word puts the repaying on Him in a sentence with no conditions attached, and His Spirit has been holding this whole matter for far longer than you have.