Thirty Feet and Six Years

He takes the bin out late on purpose. Not late enough to catch himself at it, just late enough that the drive next door is empty by the time he gets there, and he has been doing it so long that he could not tell you when it started. Nobody decided it. It arranged itself, the way a path arranges itself across a lawn, one small avoidance at a time, until the grass has given up in a line.

He knows the car. A green estate with a dented wing that has been dented for four years. He knows the dog is called Rusty, because he has heard it shouted down a garden a thousand times. He knows which upstairs light stays on past one in the morning. What he does not know is the man's name. Six years, thirty feet, a low hedge and a shared drain, and not the name.

In March there was an ambulance outside that house at about eleven at night, and the blue light went round and round the ceiling of his landing. He stood at the window in his socks with the curtain bunched in his hand and he did not go out. Not because he did not care. He cared so much his chest hurt. He stayed inside because after six years of nothing, going out would have been the strangest thing he had ever done, and he could not think of one sentence that would not have landed like an intrusion.

And you were at that window. Maybe it was not an ambulance and maybe it was not March, but you have stood behind your own curtain with a good heart and no sentence, and you have gone back to bed carrying something you would struggle to put a name to. Hear me, because I am not here to scold you. You are not a coward. You are a decent person who let a small silence set, and set silence is heavy, and you have been carrying yours up and down your own stairs for years.

Somebody measured the thirty feet

Let me say the true thing about your street, because I do not think it is the thing you have been telling yourself.

It is not that you do not care about them. You have thought about that house at your own kitchen sink. You have built an opening line while the tap ran and thrown it in the bin before you turned the water off. You are not cold, and the evidence is that this bothers you at all.

What stops you is arithmetic. At six months, a wave over the bins costs nothing. At six years, the first word has to carry the whole six years on its back, which is more than any ordinary sentence can lift. So the silence protects itself: the longer it runs, the bigger the first word has to be, and the bigger it has to be the less likely you are to say it. That is the weight. Not indifference. Arithmetic.

You are not a cold man and you never were. The written word measures a heart by what it wants rather than by what it has managed to say at a hedge, and the Holy Spirit is the One who has kept this bothering you for six years, which is itself the evidence.

Now hear where you are actually standing, because Paul says something about addresses that almost nobody stops on.

And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.Acts 17:26

Read the last clause again. The bounds of their habitation. God is not neutral about geography. He determined the times, and He determined the boundary lines of where people live. Which means thirty feet is not an accident of a mortgage rate. Somebody measured it. You did not land beside that man; you were set beside him.

That changes what your street is. It is not a row of strangers you happen to be parked among. It is an assignment so ordinary that you have never once considered it might be one.

You are standing where you were placed. Not parked beside a stranger by a mortgage rate. The written word puts the bounds of a habitation under God's own determination, and the Holy Spirit has been on that drive with you every late bin night since you moved in.

Now let me be plain about what I am not going to do. I am not going to give you a sentence to say. If I handed you a script you would practice it at the mirror until it stopped being yours, and he would hear the practice in it before you reached the end of the first line. Nobody has ever been reached by a rehearsal.

I am not giving you a target either. That man is not a project and he is not a number on anybody's board. Read the very next thing Paul says: God is not far from any one of us. Not far from him. God was at that house long before you ever thought about knocking, and the road that man walks with his Maker is God's own road, not one you are drawing for him. You are being a human being to a human being who lives thirty feet away, and that is the whole of what has been asked of you.

You are carrying nothing that is not yours to carry. The written word never hands you responsibility for another person's road, and the Holy Spirit was at that house long before you thought about knocking, and He is not waiting on your opening line.

So what is the mountain here? Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed speaks to a mountain, and speaking is the appointed means, and that invitation is open to people like you and me and not only to people in the book of Acts. But notice which mountain.

Not the man. You have no authority over another person's will and you would not want it if it were offered, because the day you could make a neighbor respond is the day you could never again believe he meant it. The mountain is smaller than that and much closer. It is the dread that arrives in your chest at your own front door. That one is yours, it has been sitting on you for six years, and in all that time it has never once been spoken to out loud.

You have authority over the thing on your own handle. The written word gives the speaking to you and keeps the man across the hedge entirely His, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that a live power rather than a nice idea in a stairwell.