The Prayer in the Parking Lot

He parks at the far end on purpose, and he has done for about three years.

Not because of the crowd. Because the far end is dark and nobody walks past it on the way to their own car, and what he needs after a meeting like tonight is eleven minutes where nobody can see into his windscreen.

It was a good message. That is the thing. It was a very good message, and the man preaching it meant every word, and there was a moment about two thirds of the way through where the whole room got very quiet, and Marcus felt something open in his chest that he does not have a word for. And then the meeting ended and everybody moved toward the doors and there was that noise of two hundred people getting their coats, and he came out here and put the key in and did not turn it.

Because there is a thing he has to do first.

He has to pray it again. The whole thing: sorry, and thank you, and I mean it, and please, and he says it with his eyes shut and his hands on the wheel, and it takes about four minutes, and afterward he sits for a while. Then he starts the car and drives home and he is completely fine.

He has never told his wife. It is not a secret exactly. It is more that he does not know how you would put it: after church I sit in the dark and get saved again in case tonight showed me I was not. He knows how that sounds. He is a sensible man with a mortgage and a decent job and he leads a small group on a Tuesday, and three or four times a month he sits alone in a parking lot doing this.

If you are reading this and something in you has gone very still, then you know that eleven minutes. Yours may be a different place. But you have somewhere you go and something you re-say, and the better the message was, the more you need to do it.

I want to show you a verse about a priest and a schedule, because the schedule is the whole thing.

The difference is the frequency

Who needeth not daily, as those high priests, to offer up sacrifice, first for his own sins, and then for the people's: for this he did once, when he offered up himself.Hebrews 7:27

The writer is comparing two priesthoods and he draws the line in an unexpected place. Not on sincerity. Not on power. On frequency.

The old priests needed to do it daily. That is the mark of a thing that does not finish: it has to be redone on a schedule, and the schedule itself is the confession that the last one did not settle it.

And then: for this he did once, when he offered up himself. Once. And the reason it was once is given in the same clause: because of what He offered. He did not bring something outside Himself that would need replacing next week. He offered Himself, and a thing like that does not need a second attempt.

You are covered by an offering that had no schedule attached, and it is already done, and the once in it is the whole point of the sentence. I am not putting a shine on a man's hard habit in a dark parking lot. It is written in Hebrews 7:27, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a comparison about frequency out to a car at the far end.

What the good message actually did

Now here is the part that will sound strange, and it is the key to the whole thing.

Marcus did not need the eleven minutes after a bad meeting. It is the good ones that send him out there. The stronger the sense of God in the room, the more urgently he needs to redo it in the dark afterward.

Sit with that for a second, because it tells you what is happening. Nearness is registering in him as exposure. When God comes close, some part of him assumes he is about to be found out, and so he goes and re-secures the thing before anybody can look too closely.

But look at what the verse says the priest offered first for his own sins, and then look at what it says about Christ: He had none to offer for. There is nobody in this arrangement about to be found out.

You are not about to be exposed, and it is already all known, and the one who knows it is the one who dealt with it. Scripture says He offered Himself once and He is holy, harmless, undefiled and separate from sinners (Hebrews 7:26), and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns nearness from a threat into a welcome for a man sitting in the dark with the key in his hand.

Nothing here is telling you not to pray

And let me be very clear, because a man like Marcus will take one wrong sentence and add it to the pile.

Nobody is telling you to stop praying in your car. Pray in the car for the rest of your life. Pray on the way home about your daughter and your Tuesday group and the conversation you did not handle well on Thursday.

What is being taken away is not the prayer. It is the obligation. Right now, those eleven minutes are load-bearing: he believes something would fall if he skipped them. That belief is the only thing being removed here, and what is being put in its place is a finished work with no schedule.

You are free to pray without being required to secure anything, and it is already secure, and it was secure before you parked. It is written that He did it once when He offered up Himself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man pray as a son rather than as a man renewing a license.