Arriving at the Speed of the Road

You drove for thirty five minutes. Some of it was fast, some of it was stopped, and all of it had a clock running underneath it.

Then you parked, walked up a path, and knocked on somebody's door.

And here is the thing almost nobody accounts for: you were still going. The car had stopped. You had not. You came through that door at road speed and you sat down at road speed, and for the next hour you were physically in a living room and mentally still somewhere on the highway.

The people in that house felt it. They could not have named it and they would never say it, because you came, and coming is the thing that matters, and they were glad.

But if you asked them afterward how the visit was, some of them would pause slightly before answering, and the pause is the whole subject of this article.

You were there. You were not with them. There is a difference and everybody can feel it and hardly anybody can describe it.

I want to look at a doorway in Luke with you, because there is a decision made at that door that changes everything that happens afterward.

Two men, a road, and a door

Two of them had walked about seven miles that afternoon, talking the whole way, and a stranger had joined them and explained the Scriptures to them on the road.

Then they got to where they were going.

But they constrained him, saying, Abide with us: for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent. And he went in to tarry with them. (Luke 24:29, King James Version)

Look at what happens at that door, because it is a hinge.

He made as though he would have gone further. The journey had its own momentum and the momentum was carrying Him past the house. And they stopped it, deliberately, with a sentence: abide with us.

Abide is a word about staying. It is the opposite of passing through. And the reason they give is completely ordinary and slightly beautiful: it is toward evening, and the day is far spent.

Then everything that matters in that story happens inside the house. The bread, the recognition, their eyes opened. None of it happened on the road, and all of it happened because somebody stopped the momentum at a doorway.

You are one deliberate sentence away from actually arriving, and the momentum has never once had the right to carry you past the people you came for. Luke 24:29 puts the whole hinge of that evening at a door rather than on the road, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an ordinary threshold into a place where something changes.

Nobody arrives by accident

Here is what that scene teaches about pace, and it is very practical.

Arriving is not automatic. The body arrives automatically. The person does not.

Those two men had to say something out loud to make the staying happen. Left alone, the evening would have carried on the way the day had been going, and the story would have ended with a stranger walking off up a road and two men going in to their supper none the wiser.

That is what happens in most visits. Nobody does anything wrong. The momentum simply carries on, because momentum is what it does, and an hour later everybody has been perfectly pleasant and nothing has landed.

You are able to interrupt your own momentum at a door, and it has never once needed anybody else in the house to do it for you. Luke 24:29 has the staying begin with a spoken decision rather than with a mood. The Spirit of God is the one who can make a small deliberate act carry more weight than it looks like it should.

I want to be clear about who this is not aimed at. Nobody here is being accused of not caring. A person who drives thirty five minutes to sit with somebody has already proved what they think of them, and the driving was love before the door was ever knocked on.

You are already the person who came, and the arriving has never once been in doubt about your intentions. The written word records two men who wanted the stranger to stay rather than two men who had been careless, and His Spirit is well able to add landing to a love that was never in question.

What one minute in the car actually does

Now the practical part, because a decision needs a place to happen and a moving car is not one.

One minute. Outside the house. Engine off, phone down, not looking at anything.

That is not a spiritual exercise and I am not going to dress it up as one. It is a physical gap between one speed and another, and bodies need a gap, the same way a person coming out of bright sun into a dark room has to stand still for a second before they can see anything.

Sixty seconds is enough. The whole reason it works is that it is short enough to actually do, and a practice you actually do beats a better one you admire.

Then knock, and go in at the speed of the house rather than the speed of the road.

You are capable of changing speed in sixty seconds, and it has never once required a change in the kind of person you are. Luke 24:29 turns an evening on a single sentence at a doorway. The same Spirit who was in that house is not waiting for anybody to become calmer before He shows up.