Eleven Years On The Parking Team

Twenty past nine and the first families are coming in and he is already out there in the vest, doing the thing with his arm that means come on, come on, all the way down.

He is good at this. That is not modesty in reverse, it is just true. He can hold a lot forty spaces tighter than anybody else on that team because he thinks two arrivals ahead. He knows which family will need the end space and why, without anybody having asked him to know it, and he has quietly saved that space at least four hundred times.

He likes the people. He genuinely does. There is a man on that team he would call at two in the morning and has.

And every single Sunday, somewhere between twenty past nine and the last car, something in him goes flat.

Not dramatically. Nothing you would see from the sidewalk. It is more like a light going off in a back room of a house where all the front rooms are still lit. He waves the cars in and says good morning about ninety times and means most of them, and there is a part of him that has been standing in that lot for eleven years wishing it were somewhere else and unable to say so.

Because how would he say it. To whom. In what tone.

They asked him eleven years ago. He said yes. He has been thanked, warmly, more than once. The team is short. The man he would call at two in the morning is the one who does the schedule.

There is no sentence available. He has looked for one for eleven years, and every version of it comes out sounding like a man complaining about being useful, and so he has never said any of it out loud to a single person, including his wife, including God.

Nothing is being asked of you here

Let me say this at the top, because otherwise you will read the rest of it with one hand on the door.

Nothing on this page is going to tell you to leave, to step down, to have a conversation, to ask for a break, or to raise anything with anybody. Not this morning and not by implication at the end. Nobody here can see your church or your team or the man who does the schedule, and a page that cannot see your situation has no business steering it.

And nothing here is going to tell you what your gift is instead. There is no list at the bottom and no questionnaire coming.

You are not about to be handed a plan, and there is nothing you have to do about any of this today. That is not me being careful with you. Scripture is what says the true thing can be said before anything is decided, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a man to have a plan before He would deal with him.

Jethro says it out loud and nobody is a villain

There is a scene in Exodus that people quote for leadership lessons and almost never read for what it actually is, which is a man being told a true thing kindly.

Moses is judging the people from morning to evening, alone, every day. His father-in-law watches it for one day and says this.

The thing that thou doest is not good. Thou wilt surely wear away, both thou, and this people that is with thee: for this thing is too heavy for thee; thou art not able to perform it thyself alone.Exodus 18:17-18

Read what is not in that.

Moses is not accused of anything. The people are not accused of anything. Nobody is lazy, nobody is careless, nobody has failed to notice. The work is genuinely needed and Moses is genuinely capable and it is genuinely wearing him away, and all three of those are true at the same time, which is exactly the situation you have been unable to describe for eleven years.

You are allowed to say that a thing is not good for you without one word of it being an accusation against anybody. I am not softening the passage. Exodus 18 has Jethro say the flat sentence out loud in the first day, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written scene like that and makes it give a man permission he did not know was available.

The flatness is information, not ingratitude

Now the thing you have been afraid of, said plainly.

You have been treating the flat feeling as a defect in your gratitude. That is why you have never said it. Because the moment you form the sentence, the next thought is: listen to yourself, they asked you, they thanked you, the team is short.

Gratitude and fit are not the same measurement and they have never been in competition.

You can be glad you were asked, glad of the people, glad you can do it well, and still be a man standing in the wrong room. Those do not cancel. In Exodus, Moses is doing important work that God gave him and it is still too heavy for him and both sentences are in the same paragraph.

You have not been ungrateful for eleven years, you have been in possession of information you were not allowing yourself to say. The word puts a good man doing a needed thing badly suited to him and calls it not good without calling it sin, and the Spirit who searches all things has known about row four every Sunday for eleven years.

He is not asking you to pretend

And here is the part that matters most, and it is not about the parking team at all.

You have been carrying this in a way that keeps it from God. Not deliberately. It just never made it into a prayer, because you could not find a way to say it that did not sound like ingratitude, and a man does not bring God a complaint he is ashamed of.

Which means for eleven years there has been a real thing about your actual life that you have not brought Him.

He knows about it. He has known about it since the second year. What has been missing is not His awareness, it is your saying it.

You are permitted to bring Him the true sentence, and He has never once asked you to pretend a room fits when it does not. The word is full of people saying flat, unflattering, unresolved things to God out loud, and the Spirit who helps our infirmities is not waiting for you to phrase it acceptably first.

And He knows where you actually fit. That is not a promise about next year and I am not going to make one. It is a statement about what is already known on His side.