Eleven Weeks of Meaning To

The van came on a Saturday in March, and she watched it from the front room the way everybody on a street watches a van.

A young family. Two small children, one of them still being carried. A grandmother who came for the first fortnight and then stopped coming. Boxes going in for two days and a mattress that stood against the wall in the front garden until Tuesday.

And she thought, standing at her own window with a tea towel in her hand: I'll take something over.

She meant it. She has never once not meant it.

Week two she thought the same thing and did not, because they were still unpacking and it seemed intrusive. Week four she thought she had left it slightly long. Week seven she was in the middle of something. Week nine she saw the mother in the street and said hello and thought afterwards, that would have been the moment, that was the moment, and I let it go by.

It is eleven weeks now. The kindness is still in her kitchen. It has not moved an inch, and it has started to turn into something that feels less like kindness and more like an accusation.

That is your window. That is your eleven weeks. And I have got a word for you, and it is not the word you have been giving yourself.

The opportunity is present tense

Paul writes a sentence about doing good that has a piece of timing in it most people skate straight over.

As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith.Galatians 6:10

As we have therefore opportunity. Not as we had. Not as we should have taken. As we have, present, continuous, arriving fresh, which is exactly what your street has been doing every single one of those eleven weeks.

You have opportunity today. Not a missed one behind you. One in front of you, this afternoon, in the form of a family across a road who are still there and still new and still tired. The written word puts the having in the present tense, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that a live thing in a woman with a tea towel rather than a nice principle she agrees with.

Now hear me on what those eleven weeks actually are, because you have been reading them completely wrong.

You have been reading them as evidence of a coldness in you. They are the opposite. A cold woman does not think about a family opposite eleven separate times in eleven weeks. A cold woman thinks about it never. What you have is a kindness that has been alive and awake in you for nearly three months and has been stopped every time by one thing, and it is not coldness, it is embarrassment about the delay itself.

That is the trap, and it is a tidy one. The longer you leave it, the more the leaving needs explaining, so the harder it gets, so the longer you leave it.

You are not accumulating a debt. As we have opportunity has no arrears in it. The written word does not run a ledger of the times you did not go. The Holy Spirit is not standing over eleven weeks of receipts, and He never was.

And here is the thing that will get you across a road.

You do not have to explain the eleven weeks. Nobody on the other side of that door is counting. They moved in in March and they have been up to their necks in boxes and small children and a grandmother who stopped coming, and they do not have a private log of which neighbors came when.

You are free to arrive without an apology. The written word says do good, and it does not require you to preface it with an account of your timing. The Holy Spirit gives courage for the plain version, which is a woman crossing a road with something in a tin.