Three Doors Down

You know his name. You know it because it is on a parcel that came to you by mistake in the second week, and you took it round, and he opened the door about a third of the way and said thank you, and that was the whole of it.

Two years and four months ago.

You know he is on his own because of the bins. One small bag, once a fortnight, and you have never seen anybody else go in or come out except a woman with a lanyard on a Wednesday who is there for about forty minutes.

You know he is in because the light in the front room comes on at about four and goes off at about eleven, and because you have started noticing that without deciding to.

And you have walked past that door somewhere in the region of fifteen hundred times.

Here is what you say to yourself as you pass it, and I think you will recognize this even though you have never put it in a sentence: he probably would not want anyone bothering him.

That is not a lie exactly. He might not. Some people do not. It is the sort of statement that is technically defensible, and that is precisely why it has held for two years and four months, because a thing that might be true never has to be tested.

And underneath it there is a second sentence, which is the real one, and which you have also never said, and which is: I do not know what I would say after hello.

The proverb is about a delay, not a refusal

There is a line in Proverbs that is not aimed at hard-hearted people at all. It is aimed at people who fully intend to, and it is one of the most uncomfortable verses in the book for exactly that reason.

Say not unto thy neighbour, Go, and come again, and to morrow I will give; when thou hast it by thee.Proverbs 3:28

Read who is being addressed. Somebody who has it by them. The capacity is present. Nothing is missing. The only thing in the way is a postponement, and the postponement is dressed up as a plan.

That is the fault the verse names. Not refusal. Deferral.

And notice how small the delay is in the sentence. Go and come again. Come back tomorrow. It is not a decade, it is a day, and God bothers to put it in writing.

So take this now, at fifteen hundred passes. You have it by you. That is what is written over a person who has the capacity and the door and the fortnight bins and two years and four months, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept putting that light in the front room in your field of vision.

You do not need to know what to say

Now let me deal with the real sentence, because the technically defensible one will dissolve on its own once the real one is handled.

You do not know what you would say after hello.

Nobody does. That is not a personal deficiency and it is not a sign that you are not the right person for this. The whole of that fear rests on an assumption you have never examined, which is that a conversation is a thing you have to be able to conduct in advance. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it true in you.

Here is what actually happens on a doorstep. You say hello and you say something entirely ordinary and slightly awkward, and there is a small silence, and then one of two things happens. Either he says something back, in which case you are having a conversation and you did not have to plan it. Or he does not, and you say something about the weather and leave, and you have lost ninety seconds and he has had a person at his door.

Both of those are fine outcomes. There is no version of this in which you fail.

And you have something to say. You have a parcel that came to you by mistake two years ago and you never mentioned it again. You have a road you both live on. You have your hands, which are the thing that most easily crosses a doorstep: I am going to the shop, do you want anything.

You have it by you and it is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put you three doors up the same street.

The plain hall and the streets around it

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 that hall is remembered for was done in the streets immediately around it.

Where I come from, this is not a strategy, it is simply what a street is. Somebody is ill and there is food at the door within the hour, and nobody organized it and nobody would describe it as ministry, and the person who brought it will be embarrassed if you thank them properly.

That instinct is old and it is right and most of us in modern streets have lost the mechanism for it, and losing the mechanism is not the same as losing the instinct.

Yours is intact. That is why you have been noticing the light and counting the bins for two years. A man with no instinct does not notice bins.

What you have lost is the ordinary permission to walk twenty meters and knock, and the written word never once required a permission, and the Holy Spirit has been keeping that door in front of you.