The One Who Stopped When It Cost Him

There is a particular feeling and it lasts about four seconds, and I would guess you had it at least once this week.

You see something. A vehicle on the shoulder with somebody standing beside it. A person at a door who looks like they have been standing there a while. Somebody you know, in a lot, not moving, sitting in a car in a way that people do not sit in cars.

And you are already past it.

Then comes the four seconds. A calculation, running very fast and mostly underneath words. What is behind me. Who is waiting. What it would cost. Whether somebody else will.

And then it is a quarter mile back and the moment has closed itself, and the strange thing is that you do not feel guilty exactly. You feel something flatter than guilt. Something like having been overruled by your own day.

I want to be careful with this from the very first line, because this is the one subject where preaching does more harm than good.

You did not drive past because you are hard. You drove past because at eleven minutes to four you were carrying a promise you had made to somebody else, and the person in front of you and the people waiting for you were both real, and there is no version of that where nobody is let down.

That is not callousness. That is arithmetic that a decent person is doing at speed with no time to do it in.

Three men, and only one of them was free

Everybody knows this story and almost everybody hears it as a story about kindness. I do not think it is. I think it is a story about schedules.

And went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. (Luke 10:34, King James Version)

Start with the first three words, because they are the hinge of the whole parable.

And went to him.

Everything else in that verse is what follows from those three words. The oil, the wine, the animal, the inn, the money the next morning. None of it happens without a man changing direction on a road.

Now notice the two who did not. The priest and the Levite are usually preached as cold, and I have never been able to read them that way. Both of them had somewhere to be. Both of them had duties that mattered and people expecting them. Whatever else was going on, they were men with obligations, and the obligations were real.

The Samaritan had a schedule too. He was on a journey. He had a destination and a reason for going there, and he lost a day and a night and paid for a room and promised to pay more.

The difference is not that one of them cared and two did not. The difference is that one of them treated his own schedule as something he was allowed to break.

You are permitted to break your own schedule, and it has never once been the sacred thing your week has been treating it as. Luke 10:34 opens with a man going to somebody rather than with a man feeling sorry for him, and it is the Holy Spirit who gives a person the freedom to change direction on a road when everything in the day says keep going.

The cost was real and it stayed real

I want to stay with the cost, because the story does not minimize it and neither should we.

He lost the rest of that day. He gave up a night. He put a stranger on his own animal, which means he walked. He paid an innkeeper and he committed to paying whatever more it came to.

Nothing in the account suggests this was easy or that it fit neatly into his plans. It did not fit. It broke the plan, and he let it.

That matters for a person driving home tonight, because the reason you keep going is that stopping genuinely costs something and you already know exactly what.

You are counting a cost that is really there, and nothing in that parable has ever asked anybody to pretend otherwise. Luke 10:34 records the man paying, walking and losing a night rather than describing a stop that cost him nothing. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a person willing to pay a price they can see clearly.

And I will say the encouraging half, because a hard working person needs it said. The promises you keep are not the enemy here. Being where you said you would be is a real virtue and most of the world runs on people like you.

You are a person whose word means something, and the keeping of it has never once been the fault in this. The written word does not condemn a man for having somewhere to be, and His Spirit is entirely able to make room for one stop without unmaking somebody's reliability.

Two minutes, not a day

Now the practical part, and I want to shrink this down to something a person can actually do on a Tuesday.

Nobody here is being asked for what the Samaritan gave. He gave a day and a night and a purse. That is the story at full size and it is not this week's instruction.

Two minutes.

That is what most of the things you drive past actually need. Two minutes to stop, wind the window down, and ask. Nine times in ten the answer is that somebody is already coming, and you drive on having lost a hundred and twenty seconds.

The tenth time it is not, and that is why the other nine are worth it.

And here is the practical part underneath the practical part: you cannot decide this at the moment. Four seconds is not enough time to make a decision like that, which is why you never do. It has to be decided in advance, on an ordinary evening, sitting still. Two minutes is available. That is all the deciding required.

You are able to settle this before it happens, and no roadside has ever given anybody long enough to think it through on the spot. Luke 10:34 has the whole thing turn on a direction changed rather than on a feeling arrived at. The same Spirit who told that parable is well able to make a decision hold that was made a week earlier on a porch.