The Turn Is a Step, Not a Temperature

The coach empties in one go and the forecourt fills up with the whole of it. A family counting heads. A man rolling his shoulders out against the barrier. An older woman taking the steps down one at a time with her hand on the rail, and behind her the driver saying twenty minutes, twenty minutes, not repeating himself for anybody in particular. The sun is low along the roofline of the service building and everything it touches has gone the color of honey: the tarmac, the paper cups, the side of the coach, the faces.

He is somewhere in the middle of all that with a coffee he does not want, standing a little apart from the others, and what he is actually doing out here is trying to feel something.

That is the whole of it. Three hours behind him, three hours ahead, and waiting at the far end of those three hours is the thing he has known about himself for longer than he would ever say out loud. So he stands on the forecourt with his coffee going cold in his hand and he waits, on purpose, for something to rise in his chest that would make the whole business real.

It does not come. It has never come. He has heard other people describe it, and their descriptions all have weather in them: a breaking, a night of it, something that arrives and takes a man over and leaves him different by morning. He has waited years for that weather. What he has instead is one sentence he has said in his own head so many times that it has worn smooth. I want to want to stop. That is as far as he has got, and he is neither proud of it nor defending it. He simply cannot get past the flatness, and somewhere along the way he concluded that a man who feels nothing has no business turning anywhere.

Then the driver calls two minutes, and everybody moves at once, and he moves with them.

That is you on the forecourt.

You're not fighting anybody. There is no drama in your version either. You've known the thing a long time, and underneath the knowing you've been living by a rule that nobody ever handed you in writing: until the feeling comes, you're not allowed to move your feet. So you wait for it. And the waiting has gone on long enough now that you've started to suspect something was left out of you that other people were given.

I want to put a different question in front of you than the one you've been asking yourself all these years. Not do I mean it. Not am I sorry enough yet to be taken seriously. Jesus told a story about two sons, and the entire weight of it comes down on a foot.

The father asked which one went

Here is the story, and it is short enough that people skim it. Read it slowly, because the question at the end of it is the one you've needed somebody to ask you.

But what think ye? A certain man had two sons; and he came to the first, and said, Son, go work to day in my vineyard. He answered and said, I will not: but afterward he repented, and went. And he came to the second, and said likewise. And he answered and said, I go, sir: and went not. Whether of them twain did the will of his father? They say unto him, The first.Matthew 21:28-31

Look at what He asks at the end. Not which of them felt it. Not which one answered with the right heat behind him. Not which one's voice cracked. He asks which one went, and then He lets the room answer it themselves, because it is not a difficult question and He knew it would not be.

Now look at the first son, because he is the one nobody puts on a poster. His answer to his father was flat and ungracious. I will not. Nothing beautiful about it, nothing repentant in the sound of it, and if you had been standing in the yard that morning you would have written him off. Then, later, with no scene recorded, no speech, and not one word about what was happening in his chest on the way, he went out to the vineyard and worked.

Scripture does not tell us how he felt walking out there. It tells us he arrived. And in the story Jesus is telling, it is the father who counts that as the will being done.

I want to say the thing you've been carrying, because you've carried it a long way and mostly on your own. You're tired in a particular way that people who have never been here do not recognize: not the tiredness of a struggle, the tiredness of a person who has been standing in the same place for years waiting for a feeling to arrive and give him permission. You've prayed for that feeling. You've envied people who seem to have it on tap. And underneath all of it sits a quiet, corrosive suspicion that your flatness is the disqualification, that the numbness is the evidence, that whatever the real thing is, it happens to other people.

Hear this carefully, because it is the hinge of everything. Paul told the believers at Philippi that it is God who works in them both to will and to do of His good pleasure. Both. The willing and the doing. Which means the wanting you've been waiting to manufacture in yourself is not the entry requirement standing between you and God. It is His work, and He is already doing it. A man who says I want to want to has God's hand in him already and is standing on a forecourt waiting for a receipt.

And this is not something that used to happen a long time ago in a country far away. God turns people today, on plain afternoons, when nothing whatever is happening in anybody's chest. He is doing it somewhere while you read this.

In the house I come from, nobody standing at a door asks a guest how he feels about arriving. No host has ever taken a temperature on a threshold. The door opens because the guest is at it, and the welcome is the host's to give and never the guest's to earn on the step. That is the God who is at the end of your turn. He is not standing there with a thermometer, waiting to see whether your chest was warm enough on the way.

You have permission to move with nothing warm in you at all. Scripture answers the question by the going, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a cold step possible.