One Car Left for the School Run

Five past eight, and the driveway has a dry rectangle on it where the rain never reached, because the silver one stood there for six years and went back on Thursday on the back of a truck. The rain has been on the rest of the driveway since. The rectangle is still pale. It will darken in a week and she knows that and she is going to look at it every single morning until it does.

She opens the back door of the car that is left. The nine-year-old climbs in over the booster seat, which is the wrong way around and has always been the wrong way around, and the six-year-old follows her and sits down on a raincoat that has lived in that seat since March. There is a bag of dry cereal wedged in the door pocket. The seat belt on the left side needs two pulls.

"Why are we in this one?"

"Because this one is the one we are in."

"Where is the silver one?"

"It went to a man."

That answer holds for the length of the road, which is all she needed it to hold for. Then the radio does what the radio does, and the nine-year-old sings the parts she knows and hums the parts she does not, and the six-year-old kicks the back of the seat in time with the chorus, four beats, four beats, four beats.

She signals left at the intersection. Behind her, two children who have been told about the car and have not been told about the house, or the meeting on Tuesday, or the words the accountant used on the phone on Wednesday afternoon while she stood in the pantry with the door closed so they would not hear the tone of her voice.

At the school gate another mother waves the wave that means nothing and everything. She waves it back. Two coats, two bags, two kisses, and the six-year-old runs off without looking around because that is what she does, and the nine-year-old looks around twice because that is what she does.

Then she sits in the car with the engine still running and the radio still on and the mirror pointed at nothing.

That is you in the driver's seat, with your hands at ten and two and no reason to move them. And I want you to hear this before I say another word: I am not going to tell you what the shaking was for. I do not know. What I have for you is not an explanation and it is not a tally of what you have left. It is a Person.

Habakkuk counts it out loud first

There is a prophet in this book who stands at the end of everything and does the one thing most religious advice will not let you do. He says the losses out loud, in order, without softening a single one of them.

Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation.Habakkuk 3:17-18

Count them with me. The figs. The vines. The olives. The fields. The flock. The herd. Six, and it is not a poetic flourish, it is an economy. That is the orchard, the vineyard, the harvest, the dairy and the meat, and when the list is finished there is no version of that household still standing.

You are not being asked to pretend the fig tree blossomed. Habakkuk 3:17 spends five whole clauses on what is gone before it spends one word on what is not, and the Holy Spirit signed off on every clause of that inventory, which means the counting out loud is not weak faith, it is the text.

You have permission from Scripture itself to say the whole list out loud in the car. The lease company, the house, the meeting on Tuesday, the sentence the accountant used: none of it has to be rounded down before you bring it to God, and the Spirit is not embarrassed by the size of the number.

You were never told by God that the loss was good. He does not say it here and He does not say it anywhere, and I am not going to say it on His behalf, because His word gives me no ground to stand on and His Spirit gives me no liberty to try.

You are holding a yet that was written for people whose stalls were empty. That single word in Habakkuk 3:18 does not correct the list above it or cancel one item on it; it stands beside the list, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that word possible in the mouth of a woman at an intersection.

What remains is not an item on the list

Here is what people get wrong about this category, and they get it wrong kindly. They hear "what remains" and they start an audit. You still have your health. You still have the children. You still have that car. And every one of those sentences quietly measures a woman's comfort against a column of surviving property, which is exactly what the prophet does not do.

You are not being handed an inventory this morning. Read the sentence again: Habakkuk does not rejoice in the two goats he had left, he rejoices in the God of his salvation, and it is the Holy Spirit who moves a heart from the column of things to the Person the things were never holding up anyway.

You have not lost the thing that was actually holding you. The written word puts the joy in the God of my salvation and not in the fold or the stall, and the same Spirit who carried that prophet through the emptiest harvest of his life is in a car on a school road this morning.