You Cannot Do The Big Thing

You know what would fix it and that is precisely the trouble.

It is not a small thing and it is not a mystery. It is housing, or it is the way that service is funded, or it is the fact that there is one bus a day and it goes at the wrong time, and you could set it out for anybody in about four minutes and you would be right.

That is the real answer. Everything else is a plaster.

And you cannot do it. You are one person with a job and a family and no particular power, and the actual solution requires decisions taken by people you will never meet, and you worked that out about five years ago.

So here is where you landed, and you have never said it out loud in these words.

If I cannot do the thing that would fix it, then anything I do is a gesture, and a gesture is a way of making myself feel better while the situation continues, and I would rather do nothing than do that.

That is not laziness. It is a moral position and it has a certain integrity to it and I want you to know I have heard it properly before I say anything else about it.

And it has produced five years in which the thing has continued exactly as it was, and you have done nothing, and the only difference between you and somebody who does not care at all is that you feel bad on the way past.

John writes one sentence about two kinds of pretending

There is a line in a letter that people quote as a rebuke to talkers, and there is a second half to it that is aimed somewhere else entirely.

My little children, let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth.1 John 3:18

Not in word, neither in tongue. That is the half people quote, and it is aimed at people who say warm things and do nothing.

But in deed and in truth. Look at those two nouns, side by side, and notice that they are not the same thing.

Deed is action. Truth is accuracy. And the reason they are joined is that either one on its own goes wrong: action without accuracy is well-meaning damage, and accuracy without action is precisely where you have been living for five years. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it true in you.

You have the truth half. You genuinely do. You are one of the few people in that situation who actually understands it.

And John will not let you stop there. He puts deed first in the sentence and truth second, and both of them are required.

So take this now, five years in. You are a person who holds the truth of it and the written word puts deed alongside it as a matched pair, and the Holy Spirit is the one who joined them, and understanding a thing accurately has never once been offered as a substitute for doing a part of it.

A gesture is not the same as a part

Now let me take apart the sentence that has been running your life, because it contains a hidden move and nobody has ever inspected it.

You said: if I cannot do the thing that would fix it, then anything I do is a gesture.

That is not true, and the untruth is in the word anything.

A gesture is an act whose purpose is to signal. A part is an act whose purpose is to do something real for somebody, and it is real for them regardless of whether the system it sits inside ever changes.

If there is one bus a day at the wrong time, then a lift given to one person on one Tuesday is not a gesture. That person got where they were going. Nothing about the bus timetable changed and everything about her Tuesday did.

You have been collapsing those two categories for five years because from a certain height they look identical, and the height you have been standing at is the height of the whole problem, and from up there every individual person is invisible. Scripture says so plainly, and the Holy Spirit does not read it differently on a bad day.

Come down.

You have a part and it is written that deed and truth belong together, and the Holy Spirit is not asking you to abandon your analysis. He is asking you to do something for one person while you keep it.

What that hall in Los Angeles did while being right

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 it became known for rescue work in the streets immediately around it.

Now, the people in that hall were not naive about causes. Some of them wrote and campaigned and argued about the conditions in that city and they were right to.

And on Tuesday they fed somebody.

They did not treat those as alternatives, and it would not have occurred to them to, because the woman in front of them was hungry on Tuesday whatever anybody thought about the causes of it.

That is the thing your position has quietly cost you. Not your analysis, which is sound. The Tuesday.

The written word joins deed and truth in one sentence, and the Holy Spirit has never once made a person choose between them.