The Gate At The End Of The Lane

Top hinge went first. That was two summers ago and you noticed it the week it happened, because you notice that sort of thing, and you thought at the time that somebody would sort it.

Bottom one went the following spring and now it leans and it drags and there is a worn arc in the gravel where it has been pushed open and shut about a thousand times.

You go past it twice a day.

You know exactly what it needs. Two hinges, and probably a new post because the old one has gone at the base, and about two hours if the post is straightforward and half a day if it is not. You have the tools. You have a post in the barn that has been there since the year before last.

And here is the part that has been sitting on you, and it is the reason this is not simply a story about a gate.

You know he is not managing. That is what you actually know. The gate is the visible end of it. His wife has been gone three years, and the yard has that look about it, and he was in the shop in February with a list in his own handwriting that he read four times.

You could ask. You could say something.

And you have not, for two years, and the reason you have not is that you cannot work out how to fix a man's gate without it being a statement about the man.

Paul makes it about the moment being available

There is a line in Galatians that has a small hinge of its own in the middle of it, and the hinge is the word opportunity.

As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith.Galatians 6:10

As we have opportunity. Not: when a person deserves it. Not: when it can be done without embarrassment. Not: when you have worked out how to do it without saying anything about the state of them. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it true in you.

When the chance is in front of you.

And note the direction of the sentence. It runs outward from availability. The trigger is not the neediness of the other man; it is the opportunity in your own hands, which in your case is a post in a barn, two hinges in a drawer and a Saturday morning.

So take this now, two years in. You have opportunity. That is the whole trigger the written word gives, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put you on a lane you drive twice a day past a gate you know how to fix, and there is no clause anywhere requiring you to solve the awkwardness first.

The awkwardness is real and it is not a reason

Now I am not going to pretend the difficulty is imaginary, because it is not, and a man who tells you it is has never lived among people.

If you turn up and fix that gate, something is said. It is said without words and everybody in that lane will understand it, including him, and it is: I have seen that you are not managing. The written word settled that, and His Spirit has been carrying it ever since.

For a certain kind of man that is a hard thing to receive, and you are a certain kind of man yourself, and that is exactly why you have not done it, because you know precisely how you would feel.

So do not do it that way.

There are half a dozen ways to fix a gate that do not say what you are afraid of saying. Ask him for the loan of something, and then say you have a post spare and it is in the way in the barn and would he take it off you. Do it while he is out, and say nothing, ever. Go up and say you are doing your own and would he mind if you did his at the same time because you will have the tools out. Scripture says so plainly, and the Holy Spirit does not read it differently on a bad day.

None of those are dishonest. All of them are the ordinary courtesies that a man who has lived his whole life among neighbors already knows how to do, and you have been so busy with the moral shape of the problem that you have not used what you actually know.

You have the opportunity and the written word makes that the whole trigger, and the Holy Spirit is not asking you to solve a man's dignity. He is asking about a gate.

What that hall in Los Angeles did with its streets

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 work it is remembered for was done in the streets right around it.

Read what those people actually did and it is astonishingly ordinary. Somebody was fed. Somebody was walked home. Somebody's rent was quietly seen to and nothing was said about it afterwards.

That last part is the bit that gets missed. A great deal of that work was done in a way that let people keep their dignity, and that was not incidental, it was the skill. Doing good badly, in a way that humiliates the person, is a thing people do all the time and it was not their method.

You already have that instinct. That is what two years of not knowing how to fix a gate actually is.

The written word tells a man to act as he has opportunity, and the Holy Spirit put you two hundred yards up that lane.