I Used to Rehearse Before Church

I used to rehearse on the drive.

Not the songs. The answers.

Somebody was going to ask. Somebody always asked. And I wanted the sentence ready before the question got all the way out of their mouth. Short. Clean. Something that landed. I wanted whoever was standing there in the lobby holding a paper cup of coffee to walk away thinking I had handled it.

Twenty minutes of highway and I would run it four or five times. Move a word. Take out the part that sounded bitter. Put it back in because it was true. Take it out again because true and useful are not the same thing on a Sunday morning.

Then I would walk in, sit down, and sing about grace with a defense brief loaded in my chest.

I do not do that anymore.

I noticed it a few weeks back. Pulled into the lot, cut the engine, sat there a second. The drive had been quiet. Not peaceful in a greeting card way. Just quiet. Nothing running. No script.

I sat in that truck longer than I needed to, trying to figure out if something was wrong.

Nothing was wrong. That was the new part.

Here is what I think was actually happening all those years. The rehearsing was never about them. Nobody in that building was cross examining me. Most of them were thinking about lunch. The rehearsing was about me. I had not made peace with the thing yet, so every question felt like a door I had to hold shut with my shoulder.

You can tell how settled a man is by how fast he can answer a hard question cold.

If he needs a run up, he is still protecting something underneath the answer.

I am not going to pretend the peace showed up all at once, or that I prayed a specific prayer on a specific night and woke up different. It came the way most real things come. Slow, and mostly while I was busy doing something else. Working. Driving. Standing in a kitchen at six in the morning waiting on coffee.

What changed is that I stopped needing the room to come out a certain way.

That is the whole thing. When you need the room to come out a certain way, you rehearse. When you do not, you just go in.

So now I drive to church and the radio is on or it is not, and I think about the week or I do not, and when somebody asks me something I answer them with whatever the true answer is that morning. Sometimes that answer is I am doing all right. Sometimes it is I am tired. Both are fine. Neither one is a position I have to defend on the way home.

I still catch myself starting to draft, once in a while. Usually when I know a particular person is going to be there. I notice it now, which is different from stopping it, but noticing is most of the work.

Then I let it go and turn the truck off and walk in with nothing loaded.

The quiet is not the reward for getting through it. The quiet is what getting through it actually was.