The Driver Who Waited Outside

The function hall sits at the back of a strip of parking lot with a low wall around it, and Vince has the third space from the end because he always takes the third space from the end, because it faces the doors and you can see people coming out.

He turns the engine off at eight minutes past seven. His brothers are already halfway across the asphalt, Danny with the gift bag, Rob straightening his collar as he walks, both of them going in under the awning where somebody is holding the door and there is that sound a room makes when it is full and glad.

Vince stays in the car.

Nobody told him to. That is the thing he cannot explain when he tries, which is why he stopped trying around the time he turned forty. There was no moment when anybody said, you drive and you wait. It assembled itself over twenty years, the way weather assembles. In the family group chat the message goes out and the reply comes back in nine minutes: Vince can drive. He always can. He is reliable, he does not drink, he knows the freeways, and the parking is bad down there. He is the solution to the parking. He has been the solution to the parking at two graduations, four birthdays, a christening, a retirement party and a farewell dinner for a cousin who moved to Denver.

So he sits. The lot lights come on with that little buzz they have. He has a thermos. He put a book in the glove box in April and has read eleven pages of it since. Through the long windows he can see them all in the warm yellow of that room, the tables, somebody's kids running the length of it, Rob doing the thing with his hands he does when he is telling a story. It is not that they are cruel. That is what makes it hard to say out loud. They love him in the way you love a thing that works. Somebody will bring him a plate around nine, wrapped in foil, and they will mean it kindly, and Vince will eat it in the car with the plastic fork.

Here is what he has never said to anybody. He does not want the party. He is forty-six and he genuinely does not care about a function hall or a buffet or a toast. What he wants is for one of them, once, to look around the room and say his name, not because they need something moved, and to come out to the lot to find him. Just his name in somebody's mouth, spoken because he is the person they wanted, and not because he is the person with the keys.

Around nine forty the foil plate comes out with Danny. Around eleven the doors open properly and the two of them cross the lot, warm, loud, glad, telling him about the speeches, and Vince starts the engine and takes them home, and it is a good drive, and it is a good night, and he is not angry with anybody.

You know that car. Maybe yours is a car and maybe it is a kitchen you clean up in while the rest of them are in the other room. You are on every list somebody needs and no list anybody wants, and the loneliest part is that nobody in your life has done a single thing wrong. You have been known by name by God since before there was a family to be left out of, and He was not waiting to see whether you would be useful. That is written into Exodus 33:17, and the Spirit has been pressing it on you in that parking lot for longer than you have noticed.

A function is not a name

I am going to be careful here, because there is a cheap thing I could say to you and I am not going to say it. The cheap thing is that your family really does appreciate you. Maybe they do. It does not touch this, and you know it does not, because appreciation is a thing people feel about what you do and a name is a thing people say about who you are, and you have had a great deal of the first and almost none of the second. I am not going to paper over a real absence with a compliment. What is missing in that parking lot is genuinely missing.

So let me take you to a mountain where a man asked for something and got an answer that has nothing to do with usefulness.

And the LORD said unto Moses, I will do this thing also that thou hast spoken: for thou hast found grace in my sight, and I know thee by name.Exodus 33:17

Look at what God offers as His reason, because it is not what a family would offer. Not, you have led the people well. Not, you are the one who can handle the crowd. He says, I know thee by name. In that world a name was not a label stuck on the outside of a person, it was the person, their whole standing and story in one word. God is saying: what I have with you is not an arrangement. It is you.

You are known by God the way a name is known, not the way a job is known. Scripture settled that in Exodus 33:17, and His Spirit is what makes an old sentence about Moses land as a sentence about you in the third space from the end.

He said it before you were of any use to anyone

Now here is the order of it, and the order is the whole gift.

Every place your name is on a list, it got there because of something you did. You drive. You are dependable. You do not drink. You know the freeways. Take any of that away and the list changes. That is not wickedness, it is simply how human arrangements work, and it is why a life of being needed never once feels like a life of being wanted.

God did not arrive at your name that way. He knew you by name before you had a single quality anybody could use, before you could drive, before you were dependable, before there was a family to be dependable for. Nothing in you brought it about and nothing in you keeps it. He said it first, and He said it about you, and He said it with no reference at all to what you would be good for.

It is already settled, and it was settled before you were of use to one living person. You have that on the authority of Exodus 33:17, and the Holy Spirit does not argue with what is written there.