It Would Take You Twenty Minutes

Twenty minutes. Possibly fifteen.

The hedge outside number four grew across the path in the summer before last and has been across it ever since, and a woman with a frame has to step out into the road to get round it, and you have watched her do it more than once.

You have shears. You have a bag. You could go out on a Saturday morning and be back in before the kettle boiled twice.

A year and a half.

Now, you are not lazy and you are not indifferent and I am not going to pretend you have not thought about it, because you think about it most weeks.

Here is what actually stops you, and I doubt you have ever said it out loud, because said out loud it sounds ridiculous.

You are afraid somebody will see you doing it.

Not afraid of trouble. Afraid of the look. Afraid that somebody will come out and there will be a small awkward exchange in which you have to explain why you are cutting a hedge that is not yours, and that the explaining will make it into a Thing, and that the Thing will be about you being the sort of person who goes round doing that, and that you would rather step into the road for the rest of your life than be the sort of person who goes round doing that.

A year and a half of a woman with a frame in the road, because of a look you have never actually had.

Jesus gives a very short list and it is deliberate

There is a line at the end of a long instruction where He names the smallest possible act He can think of, and He does it on purpose, and the word only is doing all the work.

And whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I say unto you, he shall in no wise lose his reward.Matthew 10:42

A cup of cold water only.

He is not describing hospitality. He is not describing a meal. He is describing the least significant transaction a person can make: not warm water, not a drink prepared, water, cold, out of a jug, handed over, and He puts the word only in it so nobody can accidentally upgrade it while reading.

And what He says about it is that it will in no wise lose its reward, which is a triple negative in the original and means, roughly: this is not going to be missed.

So take this now, with the shears in the shed. You are not making a fuss by doing a small thing. The written word has the Lord Himself putting a floor under an act so tiny He had to use the word only to keep it small, and the Holy Spirit is the one who preserved that sentence, and there is no such thing in that verse as an act beneath notice.

The look is not about pride

Now let me be plain, because the verdict here is an unkind one and it has not helped.

You have decided that what is stopping you is pride, or vanity, or caring too much what people think, and you have been quietly disappointed in yourself about it for a year and a half.

I do not think it is pride. I think it is that you were brought up somewhere where drawing attention to yourself was the worst thing you could do, and where a person who went round doing visible good was suspected of something, and you learned that at about seven and it went in deep and it has never once been examined. The written word settled that, and His Spirit has been carrying it ever since.

That is not vanity. That is a rule you were given, and rules like that do not come off by being disapproved of.

They come off by being broken once, in daylight, with nothing bad happening.

You have an act available to you that heaven has already valued. His word puts a floor under a cup of cold water, and the Holy Spirit does not measure a thing by whether a neighbor raised an eyebrow at it.

What that hall in Los Angeles did, and how

There was a hall near the middle of Los Angeles in 1895 where a man named Phineas Bresee refused to let anybody rent a seat, and the thing it became known for was rescue work in the streets immediately around it.

Read the accounts and the actions are almost all tiny. Somebody carried something. Somebody sat with a woman for an hour. Somebody swept a step.

And here is the part that matters for you. Those things were done in public, in daylight, in front of everybody, in a neighborhood where everybody could see, and the reason that mattered is that visible small good is contagious in a way that private large good is not.

One person cutting a hedge in a street is not primarily about the hedge.

The written word puts a reward on a cup of water handed over, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the arranging about who sees.