The Man in My Passenger Seat

Four mornings a week there is a man in his car for twenty six minutes each way.

They started sharing the drive about a year ago because of the parking situation and because it made sense. His name is Ray. He is fifty something. He does not talk much in the mornings and he talks a bit more on the way home.

What they discuss is: the road, the job, a television series they are both watching without much enthusiasm, and occasionally Ray's mother, who is in a facility about which Ray says exactly one sentence and then changes the subject.

That is the whole of it. Fifty two minutes a day, four days a week, for a year, which if you multiply it out is something like a hundred and eighty hours.

Meanwhile, and separately, he has been asking God for something for about six years.

He would struggle to define it precisely and that has never bothered him. More of God. Something with weight in it. He has read what people write about being filled and something in him agrees with all of it and reaches for it, and he has asked, sincerely, many times.

And he has never once connected the two things. The asking and the car are in different compartments of his life and always have been.

The sentence, unsaid: I have been asking for something for six years and I have never wondered where it was supposed to go.

You may know that drive. The thing you have been asking for, and the person already in the seat beside you.

It is given to profit everybody

There is a short line in the middle of a long passage, and it states the destination of the whole thing in about nine words.

But the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal.1 Corinthians 12:7

Read the last three words. To profit withal. In older English that means for the benefit of everyone, for the common good, for the profit of all.

Paul is not describing what happens inside a person. He is stating what the whole arrangement is aimed at, and the aim is other people. It is given to every man, and it is given so that it can do somebody good.

You have been asking for something with a destination attached to it, and 1 Corinthians 12:7 says the giving is for the profit of all rather than for the enrichment of the one receiving, and it is the Spirit of God who takes a line from a long correction and lands it on a man in a car at seven in the morning.

Given to every man

Consider the middle of the phrase before the end of it, because he needs the middle as much as the end.

Given to every man. Not to the qualified. Not to a class of people with a particular temperament. Paul spends most of that chapter arguing against exactly that idea, insisting to a church full of ranking and comparison that the giving is spread across everybody in the room.

So the destination clause does not narrow the eligibility clause. Both are wide. It is given to all, and it is given for all, and the man in a car has never been outside either half.

That is a distinction worth holding onto, because most of what he has read over six years has been written by people with something visible to describe, and reading it has quietly taught him that this is a subject for a certain kind of person. Paul is writing into a room with that exact assumption running, and the whole chapter is an argument against it.

You are inside a giving that Paul spends a whole chapter widening, because the written word puts the manifestation with every man rather than with a category, and the Spirit of God is what turns an argument about a first century congregation into something a man can hold on a commute.

And notice that the verse describes a manifestation, which is a word about something becoming visible. Not a private transaction. Something that shows, in a room, to people who are present, which is a strange thing to keep entirely inside a person for six years.

You have been asking for something built to become visible, and 1 Corinthians 12 uses the language of showing rather than of storing, and the same Spirit who is being described is the one who fills.

Nothing here makes Ray a project

Now the caution, because a man who reads this and gets it slightly wrong will do something worse than nothing.

Ray is not an assignment. He is not a target and he is not the reason the six years have not gone anywhere. Nothing in that verse turns a person in a passenger seat into a task, and the fastest way to ruin a hundred and eighty hours of trust is to arrive on Monday with a purpose.

What is on offer is much smaller. It is one real question about the sentence Ray says and then changes the subject after. That is all. And if it goes nowhere, nothing about the asking is affected.

It is also worth saying plainly that a hundred and eighty hours of ordinary conversation about a road and a television show is not wasted time waiting for a real conversation to start. It is the reason a real question could land at all. Nobody answers a stranger about their mother, and he has spent a year not being a stranger.

You were never handed a target, because 1 Corinthians 12:7 describes a direction rather than a duty, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who makes that a relief rather than one more responsibility on a man who has plenty.