The DMV Parking Lot I Couldn't Leave While My Daughter Took Her Driving Test
I sat in that parking lot for forty minutes with the engine off, watching the glass doors of the testing center like they were going to open and hand me some verdict about my whole life instead of my daughter's license. She had the keys to a Buick with a nervous instructor beside her and a clipboard that would decide, in about twenty minutes, whether she was ready for the road. I was not ready for any of it. By the time she pulled back into that lot, I had already imagined a fender bender, a failed parallel park, a tearful walk back to where I sat, and a dozen other outcomes that had not happened and were never going to happen, built entirely out of nothing but my own racing mind.
I am twenty-one years sober, and for a long time I assumed anxiety was something I would eventually age out of once the drinking stopped and the dust settled. It has not worked that way. The bottle used to be where I poured every ounce of fear I could not sit with, and when I quit pouring, the fear did not quit arriving. It just found a new place to live, which lately has been parking lots and waiting rooms and the ten minutes before any phone call I am dreading. I used to think a sober man with a steady faith should not still feel his stomach drop over something as ordinary as a driving test. Twenty-one years in, I have stopped expecting the feeling to disappear and started paying closer attention to what I do with it while it is here.
What I noticed in that lot, somewhere around minute thirty, is that my mind was not actually tracking facts. It had no information about how the test was going. It simply kept manufacturing worst cases and handing them to me one after another, as if enough imagined disaster would somehow prepare me for a real one. Paul wrote to a young man named Timothy who was facing real fear of his own, not over a driving test but over persecution for the gospel, and he named exactly what I was mistaking that fear for. "For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind" (2 Timothy 1:7, NKJV). I had been treating my racing thoughts as information worth trusting. Paul is plain that a spirit of fear was never something God handed me in the first place.
David knew this same grip from somewhere far more dangerous than a parking lot, running from men who wanted him dead, and he did not pretend the fear was not real before he said what he did next. "Whenever I am afraid, I will trust in You. In God (I will praise His word), In God I have put my trust; I will not fear. What can flesh do to me?" (Psalm 56:3-4, NKJV). He does not claim the fear never showed up. He names the exact moment it does, "whenever," and tells us what he does the moment it arrives, before it has a chance to finish building its case against him.
Here is where my own reasoning has never once gotten me out of that driver's seat any faster. I can remind myself accurately that she is a careful kid, that the instructor does this all day without incident, that a parking lot full of other nervous parents proves this moment is not unique to me. Every sentence is true, and none of them has ever once loosened the actual knot in my chest, because anxiety was never a facts problem waiting on better evidence. It is a trust problem, and no amount of correct thinking has ever talked a racing mind all the way down by itself.
This is exactly what abiding in the Spirit offers that my own self-talk could never finish producing. Isaiah does not promise peace to the man who reasons his way to calm. He promises it to the man whose attention stays fixed somewhere steadier than his own circumstances. "You will keep him in perfect peace, Whose mind is stayed on You, Because he trusts in You" (Isaiah 26:3, NKJV). Stayed, not scattered across every outcome I can invent. And Jesus told His disciples, the night before the worst fear any of them would ever face, that peace was never going to come from the world settling down first. "These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world" (John 16:33, NKJV). He did not say the tribulation would end. He said He had already overcome it, which means the ground I was standing on in that lot was sturdier than the imagined wreck my mind kept building on top of it.
David wrote something else I have leaned on since, not about a feeling managed well but about a refuge that does not depend on my management at all. "God is our refuge and strength, A very present help in trouble" (Psalm 46:1, NKJV). Present, not arriving later once I calm down enough to deserve it. And when Zerubbabel faced a task that looked impossible by any human measure, the word given to him was not a strategy for trying harder. "Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit," says the Lord of hosts (Zechariah 4:6, NKJV). I was sitting in that lot trying to out-think a fear by sheer force of will, when the actual help was never going to come from my own might at all.
She came out smiling, license earned, completely unaware of the forty minutes I had just spent constructing and demolishing an entire imaginary accident. I laughed about it in the car, mostly at myself. I am learning, slowly and not nearly as fast as I would like, that the peace I actually need was never waiting at the end of the test. It was available the whole time I sat there, offered by a Spirit who does not need my circumstances to resolve before He gives it.
If you are sitting in your own version of that parking lot tonight, waiting on news you cannot control and building disasters out of nothing but fear, know this. God is alive, and He already knows exactly what you are imagining before it ever happens. He has a plan for you that does not depend on your mind settling down first, and a peace that was never contingent on the outcome you are so afraid of. He will never leave you alone in that lot, not tonight and not the next time the engine goes quiet and your mind starts building something that was never true.
Scriptures used (NKJV): 2 Timothy 1:7; Psalm 56:3-4; Isaiah 26:3; John 16:33; Psalm 46:1; Zechariah 4:6.
I am twenty-one years sober, and for a long time I assumed anxiety was something I would eventually age out of once the drinking stopped and the dust settled. It has not worked that way. The bottle used to be where I poured every ounce of fear I could not sit with, and when I quit pouring, the fear did not quit arriving. It just found a new place to live, which lately has been parking lots and waiting rooms and the ten minutes before any phone call I am dreading. I used to think a sober man with a steady faith should not still feel his stomach drop over something as ordinary as a driving test. Twenty-one years in, I have stopped expecting the feeling to disappear and started paying closer attention to what I do with it while it is here.
What I noticed in that lot, somewhere around minute thirty, is that my mind was not actually tracking facts. It had no information about how the test was going. It simply kept manufacturing worst cases and handing them to me one after another, as if enough imagined disaster would somehow prepare me for a real one. Paul wrote to a young man named Timothy who was facing real fear of his own, not over a driving test but over persecution for the gospel, and he named exactly what I was mistaking that fear for. "For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind" (2 Timothy 1:7, NKJV). I had been treating my racing thoughts as information worth trusting. Paul is plain that a spirit of fear was never something God handed me in the first place.
David knew this same grip from somewhere far more dangerous than a parking lot, running from men who wanted him dead, and he did not pretend the fear was not real before he said what he did next. "Whenever I am afraid, I will trust in You. In God (I will praise His word), In God I have put my trust; I will not fear. What can flesh do to me?" (Psalm 56:3-4, NKJV). He does not claim the fear never showed up. He names the exact moment it does, "whenever," and tells us what he does the moment it arrives, before it has a chance to finish building its case against him.
Here is where my own reasoning has never once gotten me out of that driver's seat any faster. I can remind myself accurately that she is a careful kid, that the instructor does this all day without incident, that a parking lot full of other nervous parents proves this moment is not unique to me. Every sentence is true, and none of them has ever once loosened the actual knot in my chest, because anxiety was never a facts problem waiting on better evidence. It is a trust problem, and no amount of correct thinking has ever talked a racing mind all the way down by itself.
This is exactly what abiding in the Spirit offers that my own self-talk could never finish producing. Isaiah does not promise peace to the man who reasons his way to calm. He promises it to the man whose attention stays fixed somewhere steadier than his own circumstances. "You will keep him in perfect peace, Whose mind is stayed on You, Because he trusts in You" (Isaiah 26:3, NKJV). Stayed, not scattered across every outcome I can invent. And Jesus told His disciples, the night before the worst fear any of them would ever face, that peace was never going to come from the world settling down first. "These things I have spoken to you, that in Me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world" (John 16:33, NKJV). He did not say the tribulation would end. He said He had already overcome it, which means the ground I was standing on in that lot was sturdier than the imagined wreck my mind kept building on top of it.
David wrote something else I have leaned on since, not about a feeling managed well but about a refuge that does not depend on my management at all. "God is our refuge and strength, A very present help in trouble" (Psalm 46:1, NKJV). Present, not arriving later once I calm down enough to deserve it. And when Zerubbabel faced a task that looked impossible by any human measure, the word given to him was not a strategy for trying harder. "Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit," says the Lord of hosts (Zechariah 4:6, NKJV). I was sitting in that lot trying to out-think a fear by sheer force of will, when the actual help was never going to come from my own might at all.
She came out smiling, license earned, completely unaware of the forty minutes I had just spent constructing and demolishing an entire imaginary accident. I laughed about it in the car, mostly at myself. I am learning, slowly and not nearly as fast as I would like, that the peace I actually need was never waiting at the end of the test. It was available the whole time I sat there, offered by a Spirit who does not need my circumstances to resolve before He gives it.
If you are sitting in your own version of that parking lot tonight, waiting on news you cannot control and building disasters out of nothing but fear, know this. God is alive, and He already knows exactly what you are imagining before it ever happens. He has a plan for you that does not depend on your mind settling down first, and a peace that was never contingent on the outcome you are so afraid of. He will never leave you alone in that lot, not tonight and not the next time the engine goes quiet and your mind starts building something that was never true.
Scriptures used (NKJV): 2 Timothy 1:7; Psalm 56:3-4; Isaiah 26:3; John 16:33; Psalm 46:1; Zechariah 4:6.
Comments
Post a Comment