Everybody Off for Twenty Minutes

The driver says twenty minutes and then he says it again with more feeling, because there is always one, and everybody laughs, and forty-odd people come down the steps into the light and the smell of diesel and frying.

Coach trips do a particular thing to people. Something about being in the same tin box for four hours turns strangers into a temporary village. By this stop the woman in seat nine has already handed round the mints twice. Two men who have never met are having an involved discussion about a bypass. A grandmother is being helped down the steps by somebody's teenage son who did not have to.

Under the lights by the doors there is a knot of them with paper cups, and it is warm there and the talk is easy, and that is where twenty minutes goes if you let it.

He walks the far edge.

All the way round the outside of the car park, past the lorries, past the recycling bins, hands in pockets, taking his time. He does a full circuit and then he does most of another one, and he times it so that he comes back to the coach about ninety seconds before the driver does. He is not miserable out there. He looks at the sky. It is not a bad twenty minutes.

He has been doing versions of this since he was about thirty, and the reason is one thing about himself that nobody on that coach knows, and the particular fear underneath it is not that anyone will ask. It is that in a warm knot of people under a light, he feels transparent.

Sit down on the bench by the doors with me a minute, and let me say the sentence that matters most, first. I am not going to ask you to tell anybody. Not tonight, not one day, not as the mature next step. I will not guess what it is and I will not offer you a list. Nothing here wants the thing itself, and a man who never tells another living person is a whole man and a whole reader of this site.

The verse that frightens people, and the sentence straight after it

There is a line in Hebrews that has been quoted at frightened people for centuries, usually on its own, which is exactly how it should never be quoted.

Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do.Hebrews 4:13

There it is. Nothing hidden. Everything open. If you carry something unspoken, that verse is a floodlight in a car park.

Now read the next sentence. Not next chapter. Next sentence.

Seeing then that we have a great high priest, that is passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our profession. And then, two lines further: Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace.

Boldly. That is the word he chooses immediately after the floodlight.

The writer of Hebrews has just told a room full of people that they are completely seen, and his very next move is to tell them to walk up to God with confidence. He does not treat those as opposites. He treats the first one as the reason for the second, because a High Priest who already knows everything is a High Priest you will never have to brief.

You are completely known and completely welcome in the same breath, and you were given the boldness precisely because nothing is hidden. I am not offering you a comforting reading. The written word puts the two sentences side by side deliberately, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a man walking the far edge of a car park.

Transparent is not the same as exposed

Here is the fear in its exact shape, because you deserve precision rather than sympathy.

You are not afraid that somebody will ask. Nobody asks. You are afraid that in a warm circle of people you become see-through, and that being see-through and being found out are the same event happening at two different speeds.

They are not. Being see-through in a knot of strangers under a light is a feeling, and it has been a reliable feeling for a long time, and it has never once been followed by the thing you were bracing for. Not in all those years. Not once.

You are held while you are seen, and you were never one warm conversation away from losing anything. Scripture says nothing in all creation can separate a person from the love of God in Christ, and it is His Spirit who makes an unlosable thing feel unlosable in a body that has been braced since thirty.