The Hour Before the Gates Open

He has keys to eleven gates and he opens them in the same order every morning, and the order has nothing to do with efficiency.

He starts at the far one, by the beeches, because that is where the mist sits. Then the two by the tennis courts. Then the long walk down the middle with the grass still gray and his boots going dark to the ankle, and the ducks lifting their heads at him and putting them down again, because they know him and he is not interesting.

For fifty minutes there is nobody in the park but him.

He has done this eighteen years. He could have moved to the depot years ago, better hours, a van, and he did not, and when his wife asks him why he says something about the pension and they both know that is not it.

The truth is this hour. He would not use a word like holy about it, because that is not the kind of thing he says, but if you pushed him he would tell you that something in him is right in this hour and is less right for the rest of the day.

And underneath that, quietly, a smaller thought he has never said to anybody: it probably does not count for anything, though. It is just the job.

That is your first gate. That is your fifty minutes. And I want to reach you before the bolt goes back, because that hour has been counting the whole time.

The going out is in the promise

There is a psalm that people mostly quote for journeys, and it ends with a line that is far more ordinary than the way it is usually used.

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

Going out and coming in. That is not an epic phrase. It is the phrase for a working life: leaving the house, arriving, doing the round, coming back. It is gates and boots and the same eleven locks in the same order.

You are kept in the going out. Not kept for later, when something significant happens. Kept in the walk down the middle with the grass gray, kept at the far gate by the beeches, kept on the way home at three. The written word attaches His keeping to the ordinary movement of a life, and the Holy Spirit makes that a present thing in a man rather than a line for a farewell card.

Now let me answer the small thought you have never said out loud.

You have been suspecting that the hour does not count because nothing religious happens in it. You do not pray much in it, not in sentences. You look at trees and you notice the mist and you check the bins by the courts and you feel, for fifty minutes, like yourself.

That is not the absence of God. That is a man walking with Him and being too unpretentious to name it.

You have been in company for eighteen years. From this time forth, and even for evermore, says the psalm, which covers the mornings you noticed and the far greater number you did not. The Holy Spirit has been on that long walk with you, and He has not been waiting for you to produce better words before He would call it fellowship.

And there is something else about that hour that you have been treating as a private eccentricity, and it is worth naming properly.

You open the park for everybody else. Nobody sees it. By the time the first pram comes through at half eight it is simply a park that is open, the way it always is, and no one on earth thinks about the man who unbolted eleven gates in the wet.

You have been doing a quiet good every morning of your working life. The written word puts God's keeping over the going out, and the going out here means unlocking a place so that other people can be in it. The Holy Spirit does not need work to be religious before He counts it as service.