Your Going Out and Your Coming In

He prays at departures. It is the only place he prays with any real heat.

Keys in hand, bag by the door, and he stops and does it properly. Lord, cover this journey. Keep us on the road. Bring us back safe. He has done it since he was twenty-five and he has never missed one, and there is nothing wrong with any of it.

Then he goes, and the praying stops, and it does not start again until the next departure.

He noticed the shape of it on a long drive last summer, somewhere past the halfway point, when he realized he had prayed about the road and not once about the week they were driving toward. Not about the family they were going to stay with, or the conversation with his brother that everybody knew was coming, or the money it was all costing, or the getting home again, which is a different journey from the going and one he has never once mentioned.

He has been covering about eleven per cent of his life and calling it praying.

And the odd part, the part that took him another two hundred miles to work out, is that he does not think the rest of it counts. Departures feel like a moment where God is appropriate. A Wednesday in the middle of a week away does not.

Two ends naming the whole thing

The LORD shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore (Psalm 121:8).

That phrase, going out and coming in, is a Hebrew way of speaking called a merism, and it is worth having, because it changes the size of the promise. A merism names two ends in order to include everything between them. Heaven and earth means everything that exists. Day and night means always. Going out and coming in means the whole of a life's movement, every leaving, every arriving, and all the ordinary middle nobody thinks to mention.

So the verse is not about departures. It is about departures, and arrivals, and every Wednesday in between.

You have a promise that covers the middle of the week and not only the moment at the door. The word names both ends precisely so nothing in between falls outside it, and it is the Holy Spirit who applies a written promise to a Wednesday, which is exactly the day a man assumes God is not particularly interested in.

Where the eleven per cent came from

Let me say something about how you learned this, because you did not decide it.

Departures are dramatic. They have a threshold in them, and a bit of risk, and a moment where everybody goes quiet. Human beings pray at thresholds; every culture does it, and it is not superstition, it is instinct meeting a real moment.

The middle of a week has no threshold in it. Nothing marks it. So it never occurs to a man to hand it over, and after thirty years that becomes a settled sense that the middle is not covered because the middle is not spiritual.

You are kept on the days that have no threshold in them. Scripture says from this time forth and even for evermore, which is a way of refusing to leave any period out, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that felt on an unremarkable afternoon rather than only at a door.

The coming in is the half nobody prays

Notice which end the psalm puts first in the other place it names them: blessed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and blessed shalt thou be when thou goest out (Deuteronomy 28:6).

Coming in, first. The arriving. The walking back through the door with the bag. The end of the week away, the last hour of the drive, the bit where a man is tired and the tiredness says things to him that it does not say at nine in the morning.

Nobody prays over that end. It is not dramatic, and it happens when everybody is worn out, and it is very often where a week actually goes wrong.

You have a Keeper standing at the end of the journey as well as the start of it. The word puts the coming in first in the sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit who is described as being with us always, which is a claim about the unmarked hours as much as the marked ones.

And here is the plain limit, because this site does not oversell. Praying over the whole of a journey does not guarantee the journey. It does not promise the conversation with your brother goes well or that the week is easy. What is guaranteed is the Keeper, over the going and the middle and the coming home, and a man who has handed over all three arrives differently even when the week was hard.