The Stretch of Coast I Drive Around

There is about four miles of coast road between the point and the second bridge, and he has not driven it since 2018.

It is not a secret. Everybody in his family knows he goes the inland way. What they think they know is that he does not like the bends, or that the road floods, or that he prefers the store at the junction, all of which he has said at various times and none of which is true.

It costs him forty minutes. Each way. He has done the arithmetic once, late at night, and then wished he had not, because it came out at something like three hundred hours over eight years, which is most of two working months spent not driving four miles.

Something happened on that stretch. He is not going to tell you and I am not going to ask, and it is not the subject of this article. What matters is that he took it where a man takes a thing like that. He is not a man with an unfinished matter. He knelt down about it, he meant it, and something settled in him that day and has stayed settled.

And he still turns inland at the junction.

Here is where it has gone wrong. For the first year or two he called it not being ready, which was honest. Then he stopped calling it anything. And somewhere around the fourth year he started reading it as information: if this were actually dealt with, I would be able to drive it. The road is the test and I keep failing the test, so the doctrine is a thing I believe and the detour is a thing I know.

He has never said this to anybody. Not to his wife, who has been in the passenger seat for a thousand detours. Not to his brother, who works the same water and drives that stretch four times a week without a thought. Because it sounds like a small thing and it is not a small thing, and he would rather carry it than watch somebody try to make it manageable in front of him.

Maybe you have four miles. It might be a road, a building, a street with a certain name on it, a town you have not been back to. Something you go around, every time, and somewhere along the way you promoted the going around from a difficulty to a verdict.

Pull in here where the ocean is flat. Nothing in the next ten minutes will tell you the detour is nothing.

The road was never the test

Here is the distinction, and everything else here stands on it.

There is what is legally true about a man and there is where his hands turn the wheel. Two registers. They are entirely capable of disagreeing for eight years without either one changing the other. The verdict was handed down in a court. The turn happens at a junction. A junction has never been a courthouse.

Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.Isaiah 1:18

Look at what God does in that verse. He invites a conversation. Let us reason together, which is not the language of a judge waiting to be satisfied, it is the language of somebody sitting down with you. And then He does the whole thing Himself: they shall be. Not you shall make them. You are standing on a change of color that Somebody else performed on you, and Isaiah 1 is where it is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who reports what color a thing is now and not a four mile stretch of asphalt.

And notice what the verse does not do. It does not set a road test. There is nothing anywhere in Scripture that makes your ability to stand in a particular place the proof of your standing before God. You have been sitting an examination nobody set, and what is actually written is about scarlet and snow, and His Spirit is the one who keeps a man reading the actual sentence.

Avoidance is a groove, not a verdict

Now the mechanism, because a man who works with his hands does better with an explanation than with reassurance.

The reasoning goes: if it were dealt with, I could drive it. That sounds like sense and it is not, and here is why. Avoidance is the single most self-reinforcing behavior a human being has. Every time you turn inland, two things happen. The discomfort drops, which teaches the body that turning inland works, and the road gets one notch bigger in your mind, because nothing has happened to correct the size of it.

Eight years of that is not a test being failed. It is a groove being deepened by use, and grooves get deeper whether or not the original reason still exists. His brother drives it four times a week and nothing happens to him, and nothing would happen on that road to anybody, and none of it has the slightest bearing on whether a man has been forgiven.

And here is the practical thing, and it is the most useful sentence in this article. Avoidance of a specific place, for years, after a specific event, is exactly what a counselor knows how to help with, and it is one of the few things in this world that responds well and fairly quickly to the right kind of help. Going to see somebody about it is not an admission that your faith is thin. It is the same move as taking a shoulder to a physical therapist.

You are not being tested at that junction, and Psalm 103 says as far as the east is from the west so far has He removed our transgressions, and it is His Spirit and not a road who reports on where they went.

I am not going to promise you drive it

Now the honest part, and I will not do to you what somebody probably did once meaning it kindly.

I am not telling you that you will drive that stretch by summer. I do not know that, and neither does anybody who says it. Some men do it within months once the reading changes and they get the right help. Some take years, and some drive it once and never need to again, and some carry the long way round for the rest of their lives and are entirely reconciled to God the whole time. There is no timetable in Scripture and I will not invent one to make this end more cleanly.

What I will tell you is that the detour was never what made the pardon real, so it has never once been in a position to unmake it. You were cleared by a finished act and not by a completed drive, and Hebrews 10 says by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified, and the Spirit is what holds that up at a junction where your hands turn inland.

And here is what you are allowed to do, which I doubt anybody has offered you. You are allowed to say the true thing out loud while you are turning inland. Not once you go straight on. While you turn. That is not pretending. Pretending would be telling your brother it is about the bends. Saying the verdict while the wheel goes right is the opposite of pretending: it is telling the truth about the court and the truth about the junction in the same movement.