The Bargain I Made In The Car Park

He said it out loud in a hospital car park at ten past one in the morning, and he has never told anybody what it was.

It was raining. The kind that is not really rain, that just makes everything wet in an offhand way. He was standing between his own car and somebody's van with his keys in his hand because he could not make himself get in and drive home, and he heard himself say a sentence he had not planned.

If You do this, I will be in church every single Sunday for the rest of my life.

He meant it. That is the part he cannot quite explain when he thinks about it now. It was not a bribe offered by a man who does not believe. It was the most sincere thing he had said in years, and he said it in a wet car park with his eyes open and his keys digging into his hand.

And now he goes to church, which he did anyway. And he sits there some weeks with a very strange feeling, because he is no longer certain whether he is worshipping or whether he is making payments.

He has not told his wife. He has not told the man he meets on a Tuesday to read the Bible with. It sounds ridiculous when he tries to put it into words, and underneath that, it sounds a little bit like something he would not want examined too closely, because what does it say about a man that he thought God could be bought with attendance?

And then last week somebody at church, meaning it entirely well, said that what he might want to try for this situation is fasting.

He said thank you. He has thought about it every day since. And what went through him, standing there with a cup of terrible coffee in his hand, was not hope. It was the recognition of a familiar shape. Here was another thing he could put on the table.

If you have ever made an offer in a car park, come and sit down with me a minute.

Nothing about that night was shameful

Let us start there, because bracing is the natural thing to do at a title like that one.

There is nothing embarrassing about what you said in that car park. Every honest person in Scripture has done some version of it. Hannah did it. Jacob did it with a stone under his head. It is what love does at one in the morning when it has run out of things it can control, and it comes out of the same place your best prayers come out of.

You are not in trouble for it, and you were never once judged for the wording. That is not me being gentle with a man holding a coffee. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been reading what was actually going on in you at ten past one, which was not commerce. It was terror and love and no more sentences left.

So this page is not going to tell you off. It is going to tell you something better, which is that the offer was not needed.

He was already turned toward you

Here is the sentence that takes the table away.

But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.Romans 5:8

Read where in the sequence that happened.

Not after the repentance. Not after the attendance. Not after anybody had improved. While. The whole enormous act was already finished and paid for at the point in the story when nobody had offered God anything at all, and there was nothing on the table because there was no table.

You are loved on ground that was settled before you ever opened your mouth in that car park. I am not saying it to be kind to a tired man: Paul wrote it exactly that way to make the timing impossible to miss (Romans 5:8), and it is the Holy Spirit, not this paragraph, who takes that from a fact you agree with into something that changes what a Sunday feels like.

And this is where the thing gets set straight, gently. If He had wanted a trade, He would have named a price. He did not name one, because He paid one.

Then what is fasting for, if it is not currency

Here is the honest answer, and it is much smaller than the one that has been circling in your head.

Fasting is not a payment and it is not leverage and it is not the missing piece and it is not a stronger version of what you said in the car park. It is the body joined to a prayer that was already being prayed. It is the whole of a person turning toward God, including the part that gets hungry and tired and cannot make itself get into a car.

And do not let it become the new offer. That is the actual danger for a man like you, and it is worth naming: a person who has been trading will reach for whatever is nearest and put that on the table too. Sincerity. Effort. Feeling it strongly enough. A purer heart. You are not required to bring any of those, and none of them were ever the currency. Scripture is blunt that it is not of works, lest any man should boast (Ephesians 2:9), and it is His Spirit who keeps that from being a doctrine you hold and makes it a weight off your shoulders.

Now something that is said out in the open here, not in a footnote. Some people must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing away from you. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with eating, if you are underweight, unwell or simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything, and let their answer be the answer. You are not further from God because of a medical instruction. Scripture says the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), and the Holy Spirit has never arrived in a smaller measure in anybody's life on account of a body.

And if this week has more in it than a page can carry, if you are frightened for yourself, put this down and ring somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anyone near you is in danger tonight. That is not going around God. That is help He put in the world on purpose.