Two Words At The Rank

Twenty to one in the morning, Terminal Two, and the rank is wet.

Hana has been in three cities in five days. The wheel on her case has been screaming since Tuesday. She takes the fourth car in the line, puts her head back on the seat, and fully intends not to speak to another human being until Thursday.

The car smells of pine air freshener and old coffee. Clipped to the vent there is a small photograph of a girl of about seven, front teeth missing, holding up a certificate with both hands.

Eleven minutes on the motorway. Wipers going. Orange lights running over the roof of the car in sequence, one, two, three, one, two, three.

Then the driver says, to the windshield rather than to her, "Can I ask you something. Do you believe in God?"

Just like that. Half past midnight, wet road, out of nothing at all.

And Hana says, "I..."

And then the machinery starts.

Because she does believe. She has believed since she was twenty three and she has never once stopped. But if she just says yes, he might think she means the group she was part of for nine years and does not discuss now, so she needs half a sentence to head that off. And then she should probably make clear she is not the sort who would say the next thing he is expecting. And then she has to be careful, because whatever she says about that has to not sound like she is running anybody else down, and she is not, she would not, so there needs to be a clause for that as well.

The sentence gets longer in her head while the car covers two miles.

"Sorry," the driver says. "None of my business."

"No, it is not that, I..."

"It is fine." He changes lanes. "My daughter asked me on Sunday and I did not know what to tell her. That is all it was."

And the window shuts. They talk about the roadworks and the price of the tunnel for the rest of the way. He lifts her case out onto the gravel and wishes her a good night and is gone before she has her key out.

She stands outside her own front door at ten past one in the morning with the case handle still in her hand and the rain coming through her hair.

And she says it. Out loud. To the hedge.

"I believe Him."

Two words and a name. Whole. It takes less than a second and it costs her absolutely nothing.

Nobody hears it, and somewhere on the ring road there is a man driving back toward the airport with nothing to tell a seven year old on Sunday.

The answer was already short enough

Let me be careful here, because there is a cheap version of this message and it does damage. The cheap version says the details never mattered, believe whatever you like, it is all the same in the end. That is not what I am saying, and it is not what was happening in that car. Everything you wanted to protect in those two miles was real. None of it was fussiness. Trying not to be misunderstood is one of the most human things a person can do at one in the morning in the rain.

But look at what it cost. And look at how short the answer is when it is given by somebody who knows it.

There is a night in Acts that reads like your car ride. A prison, well after midnight. An earthquake. A jailer coming awake to open doors and a drawn sword already in his hand, and the question comes up out of him the way the driver's question came out of the windshield, out of nothing, in the dark. Sirs, what must I do to be saved?

Before you read what he was told, take this into your hands, because you are His already and this is not being set in front of you as an examination. The entire answer given to a man in the worst hour of his life is one line long. It is written in Acts 16:31, and the Holy Spirit who moved Paul to keep it that short is the same Spirit who was in the back of that car with you and is not embarrassed by you.

Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.Acts 16:31

That is the whole thing. Eleven words. No qualifier. No which kind, no clause to head off the wrong impression, no careful distancing from anybody. And Paul had far more reason than you do to fear being read wrong, since he was sitting in that prison precisely because people had misread him on purpose and made a living out of it.

Now read the next verse, because this is where the fear you carry gets answered honestly instead of flattered. Paul did not stop at verse thirty one. They went to the man's house. Somebody washed his wounds. He spoke the word of the Lord to that whole household for what must have been half the night, and there was food on a table before it got light. The short answer was not the end of that man's learning. It was the door he came in through, and everything else came afterward and took hours.

So hear this plainly. You have the door itself in your hand, and it is not a reduced version of what better informed people carry. What is written gives that same single line to a jailer, and it comes alive in a mouth by His Spirit, which is exactly why it does not need to be lengthened by you before it will do anything.

And I will name what was really happening in those two miles, because it was not what you think. You were not protecting the truth in that car. The truth was in no danger from a taxi driver. You were protecting yourself from being read wrong by a stranger you would never see again, and that is an ordinary fear, and it has been running your mouth for years now. You were never appointed to guard your own reputation on a wet motorway. Scripture says the Lord knows those who are His, and the witness borne about you is the Holy Spirit's, not the paragraph you were assembling in the passenger seat.

You are a believer at a taxi rank at midnight with two words and no footnotes, and that is not a smaller kind of believing. When Jesus answered in the wilderness He answered in single lines, it is written and He left it written, and the same Spirit who led Him out there holds your two words steady the moment you decide to say them.