Nobody Has Ever Dropped You Off

There is a phrase you have used so many times that you say it now without thinking about it, the way a person says bless you.

Anywhere here is fine.

You say it about a hundred and fifty yards early, at the corner by the shop that closed, and you say it cheerfully, and you have the door handle in your hand before the car has properly stopped. Nine years of it.

They think you like the walk. One of them said so once, at a thing, in front of people. She said, oh, Bea walks everywhere, and everybody smiled and you smiled and that was the end of it.

You do not like the walk. You like the corner. The corner is where the good end of the street stops.

After the corner it is the two boarded ones, then the yard with the sofa in it that has been there since March, then yours, which is fine inside, which is clean inside, which you have made nice inside with your own two hands over eleven years and which nobody from that church has ever once been in.

Here is what has started happening lately, and it is why you are reading this.

Your knee. It has been going for about a year and the hundred and fifty yards is not a hundred and fifty yards any more, it is a decision, and last week in the rain you stood at that corner after the car pulled away and you had to hold the post for a second.

And you thought, standing there: I am fifty-eight years old and I am doing this to myself.

Peter said it out loud after fighting it for a week

There is a man in the book of Acts who had to be shown the same vision three times before he would move, and who then walked into a house he had spent his whole life believing he should not enter, and said one sentence in the doorway that I want you to have.

Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons.Acts 10:34

Of a truth I perceive. That is a man admitting he has just found something out.

Peter did not know that. Not really, not in his feet, not until he was standing in a room he had been raised to stay out of. He knew it as a doctrine and he found it out as an address.

That is what I am after with you today, because you know this one too. You could teach it. You have probably said it to somebody else's daughter in a kitchen.

You are no more and no less to God on that road than the woman who said you walk everywhere. That is not a comfort I am offering. That is what is written, it is settled, and the Holy Spirit is the one who walked Peter up a street he did not want to be on to prove it in a doorway.

The road is not the reading

I want to be plain about something, because I grew up plain and I have no patience with the other thing.

There is nothing wrong with your street. There is nothing romantic about it either, and I am not going to stand here and tell you that the boarded houses and the sofa in the yard are secretly beautiful, because you live there and you know they are not, and anybody who says otherwise is looking at your road from a car.

What I am telling you is what it does not mean.

It does not mean you are a lesser member of that church. It does not mean you are a project. It does not mean you have less claim on that room, less right to speak in it, or less standing than any household with a driveway.

His word says God is not a respecter of persons, and the Spirit of God has never once slowed down at a corner to check the state of the street.

And here is the part that has cost you the most, and you have never counted it. Nine years of that corner is nine years in which nobody has ever brought you soup. Nobody has ever known which door. When you had the flu in the second winter and did not turn up for three weeks, three people worried and none of them could do anything about it, because not one of them knew where you lived.

You have been protecting your dignity with the one thing that was actually costing you your care. And the written word never once asked you to buy your dignity, because it was already handed to you: God is no respecter of persons, and the Holy Spirit has been carrying that over your street the whole nine years.

What Bresee took out of the room

A man named Phineas Bresee opened a plain hall in Los Angeles in 1895 with one rule that everybody still repeats, which is that not a single seat in it could be rented.

It sounds like it was about seats. It was about reading. In a room where the rows are bought, everybody in it is being read, all the time, from where they sit, and every single person in the building learns to manage what is read.

Take the rented pew out and there is nothing to manage. You come in, you sit down, and no one in that place has to run a small operation to keep their own life from being visible.

You have been running a small operation for nine years. It has a corner in it, and a phrase, and a walk, and now a knee.

Nobody in that congregation asked you to run it. The written word says God does not respect persons and His Spirit says the same thing over your street, and the only person who has ever put you at the far end of that road is you.