The Need Two Streets Over

The hall was in the middle of the city and it had nothing to recommend it.

No gallery, no reserved seats, no pew rents, which in that century was how a church quietly told you where you stood before you had opened your mouth. A plain room, near the center of town, with the doors on the street. The man who started it had one governing sentence and it was not his own: the poor have the gospel preached to them.

That was the whole strategy. A room the people who needed it could walk into without being charged for the privilege of sitting down.

Now come to a Tuesday evening a long way from that hall.

A woman is standing at her kitchen window with a tea towel in her hand, looking across at the road behind hers, and she can see three lit windows and she knows something about the people behind two of them.

She knows the man on the corner has not had his bins out in a month.

She knows the family four doors down have the youngest one home from school again and it is not illness.

She reads the local news and she knows the numbers for the whole borough, and she has read the numbers for the country, and once, unwisely, at half past eleven at night, she read the numbers for the continent.

And she stands at the window with the tea towel and does nothing, and has done nothing for about two years, and the reason is not that she does not care.

The reason is that she cares at a size that has no door in it.

She has made the need into one enormous object, the way you would make a mountain, and the mountain has no handle on it anywhere, and every time she reaches toward it her hand closes on air and she goes and puts the kettle on instead and feels quietly ashamed.

You know that window.

You may have a road like hers, or a corridor at work, or a family two doors down, or a person you pass on the same stretch of pavement four times a week and have got very skilled at not seeing. And you are not callous. You are frozen, which is a completely different thing, and it usually happens to the people who look longest.

Because the size of it has stopped being information and started being a verdict: you cannot fix this, therefore you are nothing to do with it.

That verdict is false, and the whole rest of this message is going to take it apart.

The man who came to where he was

Jesus tells a story about a road, and everyone remembers the ending and almost nobody notices the smallest verb in it.

Two men come down that road and go past. Then a third.

But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him he was moved with compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine, then set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him.Luke 10:33 and 34

Came to where he was.

Not to where the trouble was in general. Not to the road, which was famous for this and had been dangerous for centuries and would go on being dangerous for centuries more. He came to where a man was, which was a particular number of paces off the path, at a particular hour, in a particular ditch.

And look at what he uses. Oil and wine, because that is what a traveler carries. His own animal, because that is what he was sitting on. An inn, because there was one on that road.

He does not go home for equipment. He does not consult anybody. He does not write a plan for banditry on the Jericho road, and nobody in the story ever suggests he should have.

He uses what is on him, on the person who is in front of him.

And this is the mercy sitting underneath the whole thing: God never once handed you the road. He handed you the paces. The paces are the assignment, and the reason your hand closes on air when you reach toward the mountain is that the mountain was never given to you to carry. Somebody else is carrying that, and He is not tired.

Your part is small on purpose. Not because you are small, but because near is how mercy actually travels. It has never gone any other way. It goes from a person with something on them to a person a few paces off the path, and it has crossed whole centuries at that speed. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it true in you.

So take this before the story below. You have a near thing and it is exactly your size, and the size is a mercy and not an insult. The written word hands a person the one they come upon on their own road, and the Holy Spirit is the one who arranged which road that is, and the whole of it was never put into your hands.