Thirty Years and I Know Nobody on This Road

She counted last week, on the way back from the shop, and could not get past two.

Two names, on a road of about sixty houses, in thirty years. And one of those two is the woman at number 8 who died in 2019 and whose name she only knows because of the flowers.

It is not for want of being pleasant. She says good morning. She has taken in parcels. She held a ladder for a man opposite once for twenty minutes and never learned what he was called.

The city did the rest. People come and go on that road every eighteen months or so, the front gardens are hard standing now, and nobody stands outside anything, and there is no reason for two people on that street ever to be in the same place at the same time unless something goes wrong.

And what she was really turning over, walking back with her bag, was not loneliness exactly. She has her own people, elsewhere, and a full enough life. It was something stranger: I have spent thirty years somewhere that I have never actually been part of. Was any of this on purpose, or did I just end up here?

That is your road. That is your walk back. And I want to answer that, because there is a sentence in Acts about where people live and it does not read like an accident.

The bounds were set

Paul is speaking to a crowd who thought of geography as luck, and he says something about it.

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

The bounds of their habitation.

Not just which country. The word is about boundaries, edges, the actual limits of where a person dwells. And the times too: the times before appointed, so the when as well as the where.

He says this to strangers in a city, about all of them at once, without knowing a single one of their addresses. He is describing something God does as a matter of course with everybody, and that includes a woman on a terraced road with sixty houses and hard standing where the gardens were.

You are living somewhere that was appointed and not left over. Not somewhere you simply drifted into for three decades. The written word puts the times and the bounds under God's determination, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a woman walking back from a shop with two names.

Now let me say something about the road, because thirty years of this can start to look like a personal failure.

It is not one. Hard standing, eighteen month tenancies and cars that go straight into a drive are what happened to streets, and they happened to you rather than being caused by you, and no amount of being nicer would have produced sixty names.

You are not carrying a fault here. The written word does not measure a life by how many neighbors could pick you out. The Holy Spirit has been on that road all thirty years and has never once filed you as unfriendly.

And now the actual question, the one from the walk back.

Did I just end up here? No. That is the flat answer, and it is not sentimental. The verse says the bounds were determined, and it says it about everybody, which means it is said about a road you cannot get more than two names off.

You are not somewhere by default. The times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation, and both halves of that cover a terraced street. The Holy Spirit has been in that house since the day you moved in, and thirty years is not an accident that lasted.