The Same Two Miles Twice A Day

Out at seven forty. Back at eight ten. Out again at three fifteen. Back at three forty five.

Same road. Same bend by the fence with the leaning post. Same place where you have to wait because of the parked car outside the house with the blue door.

You have driven that road, by a rough count, somewhere north of two thousand times.

And the thing about it is that it is not far. That is what makes it strange to complain about. It is two miles. It is nine minutes. A person cannot reasonably sit at a table and tell somebody that nine minutes is wearing them out.

But it is not the nine minutes. It is the two thousand of them, laid end to end, and the small cold arithmetic that starts up somewhere around year four, where you work out how many hours of your one life have now been spent between the fence with the leaning post and the house with the blue door.

I am not going to hand you a better use of the drive. There is nothing to listen to that fixes this, and if there were, you would have found it by now.

Somebody is watching the going out

There is a line at the end of a psalm that pilgrims used to sing on the way somewhere, which is worth knowing before you read it.

The LORD shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore. (Psalm 121:8, King James Version)

Going out and coming in. That is the whole of a day, said the way an old farmer would say it. Out in the morning, back at night, and the psalm puts a guard on both ends of it.

Now notice what it does not say. It does not say the going out is important. It does not say there is a purpose hidden in it that will be revealed later. It says somebody is keeping it, which is a different claim altogether and a much better one.

You are kept on that road, and the keeping of it started long before you turned the key. Psalm 121:8 puts a guard on the going out and the coming in, and the Holy Spirit is the one who applies a pilgrim song to two miles of tarmac driven four times a day.

The people who sang that were walking to a festival, sometimes for days. Their road was dull for most of it. Hills, dust, the same person's back in front of them for hours. Psalm 121 is not a song about scenery. It is a song for people in the middle of a long ordinary journey who wanted to know somebody had an eye on it.

You have somebody watching this journey, and the ordinariness of it has never once made it beneath notice. It is written in Psalm 121:8 that the going out and the coming in are both kept, and the Spirit of God is the one who says that over a car and not only over a pilgrimage.

The arithmetic in your head is doing something dishonest

Let me name what that little sum is actually doing, because I have done it too and it is not neutral.

When that sum runs, every one of those nine-minute blocks goes into the total at zero, and what comes out the other end looks like a theft.

You have not been robbed by that road, and the total in your head has never once been an honest one. Psalm 121:8 puts a keeping on the going out rather than a price on it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who audits a sum a tired person did at midnight.

But there was a person in the car for most of them. Sometimes three. And the conversations that happened in there, if you tried to list them, would run to a length that would embarrass the arithmetic.

Nobody has their most honest conversation face to face at a table. They have it sideways, in a car, looking out of a windshield, when the pressure of eye contact is off and there are nine minutes and no exit.

Psalm 121:8 calls that kept ground, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes the word keeping land on a stretch of road a person had written off as waste.

You have been driving on kept ground, and none of those two thousand journeys went into the ledger as nothing. Psalm 121:8 has God preserving the going out and the coming in, and the Spirit of God is the one who prices what a household calculator got wrong.

I am not saying the drive is secretly wonderful. Some of it is genuinely just a road, and there are days when nobody says anything and the radio is bad.

I am saying the sum in your head only counted one side of it, and it is not a verdict on your life. It is not a score and it is not evidence about who you are. It is a badly done total.

You are not wasting your life on that road, and the tally you have been running has never once been the whole account. The written word covers the going out and the coming in without ranking them in Psalm 121:8, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the calculator out of a person's hand.

Two miles you stopped looking at

Here is the other thing, and it is smaller.

You stopped seeing it. Not the road, you see the road, you would notice a dog. I mean you stopped looking at anything on it. The fence, the field behind it, the tree that came down in the storm in February and is still lying there, the house that has been painting one side of itself for eighteen months.

That is not a moral failing and there is no discipline to take up here. It is what a brain does with a route it has learned. It files the whole thing and stops spending attention on it.

You have not gone blind to your own life, and a learned route has never once been the same thing as a numb heart. The written word calls that ground kept in Psalm 121:8, and the Holy Spirit is the one who hands a place back to somebody who had filed it as a corridor.

But something goes with the attention, and it is not the scenery. It is the sense of being anywhere at all.

Psalm 121:8 is not asking you to enjoy the fence. It is telling you the ground under it is kept, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes kept ground into a place rather than a corridor.

You are somewhere real for those nine minutes, and it has never once been an empty corridor between two places that matter. Psalm 121:8 says the LORD preserves the going out, and the Spirit of God is the one who gives a stretch of road back to a person who had stopped seeing it.