The Last Forty Minutes Of The Drive Home

Anybody who drives a long way home on a Sunday knows there is a place on the road where it happens.

It is a specific place. That is the part that always surprises people when they finally say it out loud. It is not vague. For one man it is the second bridge. For a woman it is where the radio station starts breaking up. For somebody else it is the exit with the gas station that has the bad coffee.

Picture the family in the truck. They have had two good days. Real ones. The kind that go into the drawer where a person keeps the days worth keeping. Somebody caught a fish. Somebody laughed so hard at dinner they had to put their fork down.

They are ninety minutes from home and everything is fine.

And then they come around a particular bend, and the man driving feels it arrive in his chest, and it is like a door closing somewhere behind him. The weekend is over. Not later, when they pull in. Now. Right here, at this bend, forty minutes out.

His wife is asleep. The kids are on their tablets. Nobody sees it happen. And it would sound absurd to describe, so he has never described it, not once in nine years of this drive.

For the rest of the way he is answering emails in his head. By the time the tires hit the driveway he has already been at work for half an hour, and the two good days are further away than the miles account for.

That is the thing worth naming. The weekend did not end when the weekend ended. It ended forty minutes early, every single week, and over nine years that is a great deal of good life handed over to a stretch of highway.

The promise is attached to the road

There is a psalm about travel that people put on cards without noticing what it does with time and place.

The LORD shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore. (Psalm 121:8, King James Version)

Going out and coming in. That is a Hebrew way of saying the whole of ordinary life, and it is specifically the moving parts of it. Leaving and arriving. The doorway and the road.

Notice where the covering is put. Not on the destination. On the transit. The psalm covers exactly the part of the week that the man in the truck thought he was on his own for.

You are not traveling that road alone and were never asked to hold a Sunday together by yourself, and Psalm 121 puts the covering on the going out and the coming in rather than on the arrival, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that true at fifty five miles an hour on a specific bend.

The other thing to see is the timing at the end of it. From this time forth. Not one day. Not eventually. From now, and continuing.

You have a covering that is already running rather than one that starts when the week begins, and Psalm 121:8 dates it from this time forth in plain words, and it is the Spirit of God who keeps an old traveling song from turning into a decoration on a wall.

A door closing is not a verdict

Here is what actually happens at that bend, and it is worth understanding rather than fighting.

A body that has learned a route has learned what the route means. The bend does not carry any information. It has no opinion about anybody's job. But it has sat next to the end of a weekend two hundred times, and a nervous system files that away and reports on it faithfully.

So the dread is not a message. It is a memory with a location attached to it.

That distinction matters, because a man who thinks the feeling is a message will start believing the message. He will conclude that the good days were borrowed, that this is what he really is, and that the fishing and the laughing were an interruption in his actual life rather than the point of it.

You were not handed a verdict at that bend, and Scripture never treats a feeling with a location on it as a ruling on anybody's life, and the same Spirit who spoke to a discouraged prophet under a tree does not deal with tired people by informing them what they really are.

There is a sentence in Deuteronomy that is aimed at people about to travel into something hard, and the grammar of it is worth reading slowly.

And the LORD, he it is that doth go before thee; he will be with thee, he will not fail thee, neither forsake thee: fear not, neither be dismayed. (Deuteronomy 31:8)

He goes before. Which means the week the man is dreading at that bend has already been walked into by somebody, ahead of him, before he arrives.

You have not been sent into Monday first, and the text has Him going before rather than waiting at the far end of it (Deuteronomy 31:8), and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that word to a truck on a Sunday night and makes it something other than a nice idea.

What this does not promise

Let me be plain, because this is where a message about work goes wrong.

Nothing here says the bend stops doing that. It might do it next Sunday exactly as it has for nine years. This is not a technique for deleting a feeling.

Nothing here promises the week is good. The week might be the week. The man with the emails will still have the emails, and no line in this article changes one of them.

And plainly: if that feeling has stopped being about the drive, if it has spread across the whole week, if you cannot get out of bed, or if some part of you has begun wanting it all to stop, this is not the right size of help. Call or text the 988 crisis line, and say the true version out loud to a doctor or a counselor or a pastor you trust. There is no faith in going it alone.

What is on the table is the forty minutes. That is all. Forty minutes of road that got handed over without anybody deciding to hand it over.

You are allowed to keep the last of a good weekend, and Psalm 121 covers the coming in as deliberately as it covers the going out (Psalm 121:8), and it is the Spirit of God who makes forty minutes of highway feel like it still belongs to a person.