Directing Cars in a High Vis Vest

Two rows, nose in, and keep the middle clear for the minibus, and there is a cone that has been run over twice and that everybody has become fond of.

Twenty past ten to eleven. Forty minutes. He is out there whatever the weather in a vest that was bought for somebody bigger, and he has a way of standing that means the drivers can see him from the road, which is the whole art of it.

He knows every car. He knows who reverses well and who does not and who will need the space by the wall. He knows the family who arrive at four minutes to and always will, and he has stopped minding, and he waves them into the place he has been keeping without either of them ever mentioning the arrangement.

He is the most visible person on that site.

Bright yellow, on his feet, out in the open, arms going, for forty minutes, in front of about ninety people. And he is the least looked at man there, because nobody looks at a car park attendant, and that combination is exactly why he has done this job for six years and would not swap it for a thing.

And on his own, since a bad stretch a long way back, he has been trying to get to a place where he is not ashamed of himself.

Trying properly. Reading, praying, working at it in the way a serious man works at something. And it has not come, and he has begun to suspect it does not come, and he is nearly ready to accept that as a fact about him.

Sit on the wall with me a minute, friend. Today I am speaking to the one who did something a long way back, took it to God straight and meant every syllable, and has been trying to feel unashamed and finding there is nothing to build it out of.

And I will say the honest thing first: I am not going to promise you the feeling. What I am going to do is hand you the thing Paul was unashamed of, because it is not what most people assume.

Of what, exactly

Everybody knows the first half of this sentence. Almost nobody finishes it.

For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth.Romans 1:16

Of the gospel of Christ.

Read the preposition, because it is the whole thing. Paul is not saying he has arrived at a settled good opinion of himself. He is not describing an inner state at all. He is saying he is not ashamed of something, and he names it, and the something is a message about somebody else.

That is a posture pointing outward.

And it makes sense of a sentence a lot of people find puzzling, because on the face of it, why would a man need to say that? Because the message he carried was a scandal in every city he took it into: a crucified man, an execution, the least respectable thing in the empire. Paul had every reason to be embarrassed of the content, and he opens the letter by saying he is not.

So he never once claimed to have got himself to a place of feeling fine. He was handed something worth carrying and he carried it in the open.

You have been given something to be unashamed of, and you were never going to reach it by working on how you feel about yourself. I am not offering you an easier project. The written word attaches the unashamedness to an object outside the man, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it to a man in a yellow vest on a Sunday morning.

The vest and the message

Now here is what I want you to see about six years of car parks, and I say it as somebody who has watched a great many men do that job.

You are the most visible person on that site and the least looked at, and you chose that combination, and I know why you chose it.

And it turns out to be a very close picture of what the verse describes. A man in a high vis vest is not asking anybody to look at him. He is wearing the bright thing so that a message gets through: this way, there is space, come in, mind the cone. The visibility is entirely in service of getting people somewhere.

That is what Paul is doing with his unashamedness. He is not standing in the light so people will consider him. He is standing in it so a message gets through.

Which means you have been doing the thing the verse describes for six years while trying to build the thing it never asked for.

You are already carrying the message in the open, and you were never asked to arrive at a good feeling about yourself first. Scripture puts the power in the gospel rather than in the man carrying it, and it is His Spirit, not a resolved inner state, who makes a man's presence in a car park do the work it does.