Seven Years of Exact Change

The bell over that door has rung for him maybe four hundred times, and it makes the same sound every time, and he has never once thought about it until this week.

Bread, mostly. Milk. The paper on a Saturday. The shop is nine minutes' walk and there is a supermarket four minutes closer, and he goes to the shop, and if you asked him why he would say something about it being easier, which is not true.

The man behind the counter is about sixty. He has been there the whole seven years. He says there you go when he hands the bag over and see you soon when the bell goes on the way out, and he has said those two things to this customer several hundred times.

They have never had a conversation. Not one. Seven years of all right? and cheers and exact change, which is its own strange intimacy and is also nothing at all.

And on Tuesday, buying bread, our man had a thought that has been sitting on him since: I do not know his name, and he does not know mine, and one of us is going to move away or die and that will be that.

That is your shop. That is your bell. And I want to talk about what has been happening at that counter for seven years, because it is closer to a relationship than you think and about four words short of being one.

Honor goes first

Paul writes a line about how believers are meant to treat people, and the interesting thing is the order he puts it in.

Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love; in honour preferring one another.Romans 12:10

In honor preferring one another. The picture is of two people each trying to let the other go first, each treating the other as the more significant one in the room.

Now hold that against a counter. A transaction is the exact opposite arrangement: two people reduced, briefly and efficiently, to a pair of functions. One hands over bread. One hands over coins. Nobody is dishonoured, and nobody is honored either, because honor requires somebody to be a person and a transaction does not need them to be.

You are able to put honor into that shop today. Not by doing anything large. By asking one question that treats a man as somebody rather than something. The written word makes honor the thing that goes first, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a man walking down for bread rather than leaving it as a principle about church life.

Now let me name what has actually kept you quiet for seven years, because it is not indifference.

It is that the transaction works. It is smooth, it is warm enough, and both of you have a role in it that requires nothing. Breaking that open would mean one of you standing there being a person in a shop with a queue possibly forming behind, and that feels like a lot to inflict on a Tuesday.

You have not been cold for seven years. You have been walking nine minutes past a closer supermarket, every week, for seven years, which is not the behavior of a man who does not care. The written word calls that kind of preference a form of affection, and the Holy Spirit has been in every one of those walks.

And now the small thing, because it is genuinely small.

I've been coming in here seven years and I've never asked your name. I'm Santiago. That is one sentence. It takes four seconds. It will very likely be met with a laugh and a name, and possibly with something like I've been wondering the same thing, because he has stood behind that counter for seven years watching a man come in for bread and has probably had the identical thought.

You are free to make it that small. In honor preferring one another does not require a conversation, a friendship or a follow-up. The Holy Spirit gives courage for four seconds at a counter, and four seconds is what this actually costs.