The Cost of Staying in the Car

I wrote before about being a light I didn’t ask for, about the exhaustion of being seen when you’d rather be invisible, about the tension between stewardship of whatever God has given you and the very human need to occasionally stop being perceived by anyone.

What I didn’t write about is what hiding costs.

My neighbor and I were never friends in the conventional sense.

We didn’t have each other’s phone numbers. Never sat down for a meal together, never had a conversation that lasted more than a few minutes in the driveway. He was older, worked a blue-collar job, kept mostly to himself. His garage was mostly storage that suggests someone who has been in one place long enough to fill the spaces.

But we looked out for each other in the quiet way neighbors sometimes do. The kind of looking out that doesn’t require discussion or acknowledgment—just the awareness of another person’s presence, the instinct to notice when something seems off, the mutual understanding that proximity creates a kind of low-stakes obligation to basic human care.

For years we exchanged meals on holidays.

Nothing elaborate. Just food that said: I know you’re over there, and I thought of you, and here is something warm. He’d return the container with something of his own. We never made a thing of it.

This is not a small thing, even if it looked like one.

The Day I Stayed in the Car

There are days when the idea of getting out of the car and walking to the front door and potentially encountering another human being who might want something from you is daunting. Even just a wave, even just acknowledgment of shared existence, feels beyond what you have left to give.

This was one of those days. Long. A long that doesn’t come from a single dramatic thing but from the accumulation of a hundred small things that each require more than you have but take it anyway.

I pulled into the garage and sat there. Watched through the windshield as my neighbor loaded chairs into a U-Haul parked in front of his house. His garage door was open. He moved with the efficiency of someone who has done this before, who knows how to pack a life into a truck without attracting attention.

I watched and did not get out of the car.

I told myself I was tired.

I told myself he was busy, that interrupting a move was inconsiderate, that he wouldn’t want small talk while trying to work. I told myself there would be other days, other opportunities, that we had years of quiet neighborliness behind us and surely years more ahead.

I let the garage door close.

He was moving. That was the last day I could have said anything. Said goodbye, said it was good to share a fence line with you, said thank you for the years of quiet looking out for each other. Said anything.

I didn’t know it was the last day. But I knew he was loading a U-Haul, and I stayed in the car anyway, and now I know what that choice cost.

I’ve been calling it hiding, the way I retreat on days when being seen feels like too much.

I’ve painted it as the desire for hiddenness with God, the legitimate need for withdrawal that even Jesus practiced. And I stand by all of that. The need is real. The exhaustion is real. The damage done by chronic overextension is real, and protecting against it matters.

But hiding has consequences I don’t always account for when I’m in the middle of choosing it.

Hiding isn’t neutral. It’s not the absence of action, clean and consequence-free. It’s a choice with weight, with cost, with things it takes from the world and from specific people in ways that don’t announce themselves until later, when it’s too late to go back and choose differently.

Elijah hid in a cave after Jezebel threatened his life (1 Kings 19:1-9). He’d just witnessed God’s power at Carmel, had just seen the prophets of Baal defeated, and then immediately collapsed into terror and flight and complete exhaustion. He hid. He asked to die. He lay down under a tree and said he’d had enough.

God didn’t rebuke him for it. Sent an angel to feed him instead. Let him sleep. Fed him again when he woke. Said the journey was too great for him.

But eventually God asked him: “What are you doing here, Elijah?” (1 Kings 19:13). Not accusation exactly, but not neutral either. The question implies that here—the cave, the hiding, the removal from life—was not the permanent answer. That hiding can be necessary without being right, can be understandable without being the end of the story.

Elijah was burning out from being the only prophet left, from carrying responsibility for an entire nation’s relationship with God, from the weight of being the visible representative of something invisible. The hiding made sense. And it still had cost—all the things that didn’t happen while he was in the cave, all the people he wasn’t with, all the presence he wasn’t offering to a world that needed it.

The Theology of Presence

Christianity is incarnational at its core. God didn’t stay hidden. Could have—could have managed human redemption from a distance, through instruction and law and the occasional prophetic word without ever becoming flesh and moving into the neighborhood.

John writes that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14). The Greek skenoo—dwelt, pitched his tent—suggests proximity, physical presence, the particular intimacy of living next to someone rather than simply communicating with them from elsewhere.

The Incarnation is God refusing to stay in the car.

This doesn’t mean we’re required to be present to everyone always, that hiddenness is always failure, that every tired day in the garage is theological collapse. Jesus withdrew. Regularly. The rhythm of presence and withdrawal is woven through the Gospels.

But presence matters in ways that absence can’t replicate. The meal on the holiday matters. The wave across the driveway matters. The acknowledgment that another person exists and is seen and is worth a moment of your depleted energy—it matters in ways that compound over time into something that looks small but isn’t.

I know this. I knew it sitting in the car watching him load chairs.

I stayed in the car anyway.

The Grief of Not Knowing

There’s a weird kind of grief that comes from not knowing something was the last time. The last conversation with someone before they died, the last ordinary Tuesday before everything changed, the last moment something existed before it was gone.

If I’d known it was the last day, I would have gotten out of the car. I’m certain of that. I would have crossed the driveway and said something worth saying, something that acknowledged the years of quiet mutual care, something that made the ending of that specific neighborliness into an actual ending rather than just a Tuesday that turned out to matter.

But I didn’t know. And I used not knowing as permission to stay hidden when I was tired.

This is the cost of hiding that I hadn’t fully reckoned with before. Not the dramatic cost—the missed crisis, the friend who needed you, the obvious moment of presence that any reasonable person would recognize as important. But the quiet cost. The mundane moments that don’t announce their significance in advance, that only reveal themselves as mattering in retrospect, when the garage door has already closed and the U-Haul has already left.

What I’m Learning

I’m not drawing a simple conclusion from this. I’m not telling myself or anyone else that hiding is always wrong, that every tired day requires forcing yourself into interaction anyway, that the light must always be on because people need it.

The exhaustion is real. The need for withdrawal is real. God met Elijah in the cave and fed him and let him sleep and didn’t demand immediate return to productivity.

But I’m trying to hold this alongside that: the neighbor is gone. The years of quiet meals and mutual looking-out have an ending now that I didn’t get to mark, that happened on a Tuesday when I was tired and stayed in the car and told myself there would be other days.

There weren’t.

Maybe the lesson isn’t about light or hiding or stewardship of gifts. Maybe it’s simpler than that. Maybe it’s just: people are not permanent, and the small ordinary courtesies of shared proximity matter more than they appear to, and sometimes the most faithful thing you can do on a tired Tuesday is get out of the car anyway.

Not because you have something profound to offer. Not because the light must shine and the gifts must be stewarded and the calling must be honored.

Just because he was your neighbor. And he was moving. And you had years of warm meals between you. And some things deserve a goodbye even when you’re exhausted.

Especially then.