Waiting For Somebody Official

You are right about all of it. Let me say that first, because you have been right for six years and being right has been the whole problem.

The verge should be cut and it is not their job to cut it, it is the council's. The bins at the top were meant to be replaced in the year after the survey and were not. The path down to the shore has needed the two steps at the bottom rebuilding since before your youngest could walk, and there is a form for reporting that, and you have filled it in three times.

Every single one of those is somebody's job and it is not yours.

You have been meticulous. You have the reference numbers. You have a folder.

And you have been waiting six years for somebody official to come, and what you have learned in six years is that they are not coming, and you know it, and you have known it for about three of those years and have gone on waiting anyway.

Here is what I actually want to talk about, and it is not the council.

Your daughter is fourteen now and she has spent her entire childhood in a place where the adults she loves talk about what ought to be done and nothing is ever done, and what she is learning is not that the council is unreliable.

She is learning what people are.

The wall in Nehemiah was built by a very odd phrase

There is a chapter that is a list of names and it is usually skipped, and in the middle of it there is a phrase that repeats and that quietly explains how an impossible piece of work got done in fifty-two days.

From above the horse gate repaired the priests, every one over against his own house.Nehemiah 3:28

Every one over against his own house.

That is the whole method. Nobody was assigned a sector. Nobody was given the wall. Each family repaired the length of it that ran past their own front door, and when you read the chapter properly you find that phrase again and again, and the wall closed.

It is worth noticing what is absent. There is no central works department in that chapter. There is no argument about whose responsibility the wall technically was. There is a priest with a trowel outside his own house.

So take this now, six years in. You have a stretch. That is what is written into the method that closed an impossible wall, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put your house where it is on that road, and the question of whose job it technically is has never once been the question God asks.

Being right is not the same as being finished

Now I have to name a thing, and I am going to name it carefully because it is not a fault exactly, it is a trap that catches good people.

Being right is satisfying.

Not in a shallow way. There is a genuine, sustaining, low-level satisfaction in having correctly identified a problem, correctly identified whose responsibility it is, and correctly documented the failure. It feels like doing something. It has the shape of doing something. You have a folder. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it true in you.

And it can go on for a very long time, because it never runs out and it never fails, because you are right.

Six years, in your case, and the verge is the same as it was and the steps are worse.

I am not asking you to stop reporting it. Keep the folder. Keep filling in the form, because sometimes the form works and because your grandchildren should not have to do this either.

But there is a difference between a stretch of verge and a matter of principle, and one of them can be cut in an afternoon.

You have a stretch and it is written into how that wall closed, and the Holy Spirit is not asking you to concede a point. He is asking about the ground in front of your own gate.

What that plain hall did with the street outside 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 it became known for was rescue work in the streets immediately around it.

Those streets were, by every account, a failure of the city. Nobody in that hall was under any illusion about that, and there were people in that room who campaigned about it and were right to.

And they also fed people on Tuesday.

That is the thing that gets lost when this story is told. They did not choose between being right about the city and doing the near thing. They did the near thing while being right, and the near thing is what people remember a hundred and thirty years later, and the being right is in nobody's book.

The written word closed a wall by putting each family outside its own house, and the Holy Spirit put you on your road for the same reason.