What One Man Can Do About a City

There are eleven minutes of his drive that he has stopped being able to look at properly.

It is the stretch after the lights, past the shuttered end of the parade, where somebody sleeps in the doorway of what used to be a bank, and where the queue outside the place on the corner starts forming before nine on a Tuesday. He has driven it twice a day for six years. He knows the shape of that queue the way you know a hedge.

And what happens in him is always the same. Something rises, and then it hits the size of the thing, and then it collapses, and by the roundabout he is thinking about work.

He has tried. He gave to something for two years by standing order. He signed up to help at a thing once and it fell through at their end and he never rearranged it. None of it touched the eleven minutes.

What has settled on him instead is a low, ordinary hopelessness, and underneath it a suspicion that he has quietly become a man who drives past things.

That is your drive. That is your eleven minutes. And I want to give you something, because there is a verse that has been quoted at people for three thousand years and it is unusually specific about size.

What was actually asked for

Micah has just spent several verses on people offering God enormous things, thousands of rams, rivers of oil, and then he says what was wanted instead.

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?Micah 6:8

Look at the scale of the three things.

Do justly: be straight in what passes through your own hands. Love mercy: not perform it, love it, so that when it is possible you actually want to. Walk humbly with thy God: keep going, at walking pace, alongside Him.

Not one of the three is fix the city. Every one of them is human sized, repeatable, and available on a Tuesday. And they are set deliberately against the enormous offers in the verses before, which are exactly the kind of thing a man reaches for when he feels the size of a problem.

You have something to do this morning that is your size. Not a gesture, not a substitute for the real thing. The written word answers the question of what is required with three ordinary human actions, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a man at a set of lights.

Now let me say something about the two years of standing order, because you have written those off.

You have not. Somebody was fed for two years out of that. It did not touch your eleven minutes because it was never designed to, and a thing that does not fix your feelings is not therefore a thing that did nothing.

You have not been a man who does nothing. The written word does not measure mercy by whether it resolved the whole problem. The Holy Spirit received every one of those payments and did not think them small.

And now the hopelessness itself, which is the real damage.

It arrived because you measured yourself against a city. Anybody measured against a city comes out at nothing. That is not humility and it is not realism, it is a scale error, and it has cost you six years of driving past with your jaw set.

You are not useless in front of something large. What doth the Lord require of thee, and the answer is three things a person can carry. The Holy Spirit has been in that car for six years of that stretch of road.