The Car Is The Whole Problem

The car will not start, or it starts and you do not trust it, or the thing it needs costs more than the month has in it.

And the work is across town. There is no bus that goes there at that hour, or there is one and it takes ninety minutes each way and the childcare does not stretch that far.

So the car needs the work and the work needs the car, and you have been standing inside that sentence for eleven days.

I want to name something about that circle before we do anything else with it.

A circle like that does not just block you. It uses you up. Because the mind cannot leave it alone, it keeps going round it looking for the gap, and each lap costs something, and after a week or two of laps a person is exhausted by a problem she has not been able to lay a finger on.

You are not standing in a closed circle, and a problem with two sides has never once had only two sides.

And I want to be careful, because there is a version of this article that would insult you. The version where somebody cheerful tells you there is always a way, which you have heard, and which is not information.

I am not going to tell you the car gets fixed. I do not know that.

What I am going to do is get your eyes off the two walls for eleven minutes, because I think there is something in your week that you have not looked at, and you have not looked at it because you have been busy looking at the car.

God opened her eyes

There is a woman in Genesis who has been put out with a child and a bottle of water, and the water runs out in a desert.

She does what a person does. She puts the boy under a shrub, and she goes and sits down a good way off, because she has decided she cannot watch him die.

And then this.

And God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water; and she went, and filled the bottle with water, and gave the lad drink. (Genesis 21:19, King James Version)

The well was there.

That is the thing the verse will not let you skip. The well did not arrive. The ground did not open. God opened her eyes, and the water was already in the desert while she was sitting down to die at a distance from her own son.

You are in a story where God opens eyes rather than digs wells, and a thing you have not seen has never once been the same as a thing that is not there. Genesis 21:19 says God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does that opening.

And I want to be exact about what that verse is not saying, because it gets misused.

It is not saying she was silly for not seeing it. It is not saying she lacked faith. A woman with an empty bottle and a dying child in a desert is doing the most reasonable thing available: she is grieving.

You have not been failing to see it, and exhaustion has never once been the same thing as unbelief. The written word does not rebuke Hagar for sitting down, and the Spirit of God is the one who comes to a woman at the end of her own resources without a word of correction first.

The circle is real and it is not the whole yard

Let me be practical about the shape of your particular problem.

The circle is genuine. Car, work, money, car. It closes. I am not going to pretend there is a clever trick in it.

But a circle is a shape you can step outside of, and the question I want to put to you is not how to break the circle. It is what else is in the week.

Not instead of the car. Alongside it.

You have a week that is larger than the one problem sitting in the middle of it, and a closed loop has never once taken up the whole of a person's life. The Holy Spirit is the one who widens a field of vision, and Genesis 21:19 has a whole desert with a well in it that nobody had looked at.

So here is the question I would like you to sit with for eleven minutes today. Not more. Eleven minutes.

What is one thing you could do this week, from where you actually are, with the hands you actually have, that somebody would pay you for.

From where you are. That is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It means within walking distance, or in your own kitchen, or on your own phone, or on this street.

You are being asked about this street and this week and not about a career, and a small near thing has never once been beneath the notice of God. The Spirit of God put the well in the same desert she was already sitting in, and it is written in Genesis 21 that what she needed was in reach the whole time.

I will not name the thing for you. That is not humility, it is the rule of this site: the moment anybody tells you what the thing is, they have started selling you something, and you have been sold enough.

But you know your street. You know who on it is struggling with something you find easy.

Eleven minutes, not eleven days

I want to say why the time limit matters.

If I say go away and think about what you could do, you will go away and think about the car, because that is what your mind is currently built to do, and in an hour you will be back where you started and more tired.

So it is eleven minutes, with a pen, and the pen is the point. The pen is what stops the thinking turning back into laps.

You are able to give eleven minutes and a pen to something other than the circle, and a short bounded effort has never once been too small to count as an honest attempt. Genesis 21:19 turns on one moment of seeing rather than on a long campaign, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the opening in a moment.

And I will say the plain thing here, because this site says it wherever it belongs and not only where it is comfortable.

If the circle has taken you somewhere darker than a car and a job, if you have been lying awake thinking your children would be better off with somebody who has her act together, that is not the truth and it is not a money problem any more. Call or text 988, the crisis line, today, and say it out loud to a doctor, a counselor or a pastor you trust. The well in that story was a real thing in the real ground, and so is a human being who is qualified to help you carry this.

You are allowed to be helped by somebody trained for it, and reaching for that has never once been a failure of nerve in a mother. The written word has God sending help to a woman at the absolute end of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts a real helper within reach.