The List You Carry In Your Head

You could give it to somebody right now without notes.

The bus that stopped running to the estate. The two families at your children's school who are having a very bad year. The man who sits outside the pharmacy. The playing field. The fact that there is nowhere in that whole town for a fifteen year old to be on a Friday night that is warm and free and not a shop doorway.

Eleven or twelve items, and every single one of them is accurate, and you have been carrying the whole list for about four years.

You see it more clearly than most people do. That is not a compliment, particularly. It is a description of a burden.

And here is what you have done about it in four years.

Nothing.

Not because you do not care. You care so much that you have a list. Not because you are lazy; you are the least lazy person in your house.

You have done nothing because every time you look at the list you look at all of it at once, and all of it at once is not something a person can do anything about, and so what happens is a kind of small internal shutdown that takes about four seconds and then you get on with your day.

Four years of four seconds.

And the thing that has started to worry you, honestly, is that the list has stopped hurting. It is still there, it is still accurate, and something has gone flat about it, and you know exactly what that means.

The Samaritan did not have a strategy

The story everybody knows is usually told as a story about compassion, and it is, but there is a detail in the middle of it that is about geography and it is the detail that will get you moving.

But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him.Luke 10:33

As he journeyed, came where he was.

He was going somewhere else. He had a day. He was not on a mission to find wounded men on that road, and he had no view about the security situation between Jerusalem and Jericho, and he was not carrying a list of everything wrong with that highway.

He came where the man was. Proximity did the selecting.

That is the whole mechanism of the story and it is a relief, and I want you to feel the relief before we go on. You are responsible for the need you are next to and not for the need you can see. The written word puts the assignment at the point where a road and a person intersect, and the Holy Spirit is the one who arranges the intersecting, and He has never once handed a man an entire county and asked him to hold it in his head.

Seeing it all is not the same as being sent to all of it

Now let me say the thing that will actually change your week.

You have confused sight with responsibility. They are not the same and God has never treated them as the same. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it true in you.

You can see eleven things. He is asking you about one, and it is almost certainly not the biggest one on your list, and it is very probably the one that is nearest to your own front door.

And here is why the flatness has set in, because this matters. A person cannot hold a burden they have no way of discharging. It is not possible. So the soul does the only thing available to it, which is to turn the burden down until it can be carried, and that is what has happened to you over four years, and it is not a failure of compassion. It is a mechanism.

The way out of the flatness is not to feel more. You cannot feel your way back into caring about eleven things you cannot touch.

The way out is to do one small thing about the nearest one, because doing discharges what feeling cannot.

You are sent to a near thing and not to a whole town. That is what is written into the shape of that story, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put you on your particular road, and no amount of accurate seeing has ever been an instruction.

What the plain hall in Los Angeles actually did

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 that hall became famous for was not its preaching.

It was the missions. Rescue work in the streets immediately around it. Not a campaign, not a national program, not a strategy for the whole city.

The streets around it.

And what people who study that period notice is how small the individual actions were. Somebody fed somebody. Somebody sat with somebody. Somebody walked a person home. There was no moment at which anybody in that building attempted to solve Los Angeles.

That is not a lowering of ambition. It is the only method that has ever worked, and it worked there.

You have a near thing and it is written that the near thing is what a person is given, and the Holy Spirit put your house on your street on purpose.