Your Street Feels Too Small Now

You used to do the bins for number eleven.

Not as a scheme. You just did them, because the woman there is eighty-four and because you are out anyway on a Tuesday, and it takes about ninety seconds.

You did that for six years and you stopped about fourteen months ago.

You also used to take a plate round to the family at the end when their little one was in and out of hospital. And you used to keep the bit of pavement outside your gate clear in the winter, and a good stretch either side of it, without ever making a thing of it.

All of that has stopped, and it did not stop because you got busy or because anything went wrong on your road.

It stopped because of what you have been watching.

Something enormous is happening a long way from you. You know the numbers. You have known the numbers for about eighteen months and they have not left you, and one night last spring you sat with your phone and read for two hours and then could not sleep.

And somewhere in there your sense of scale broke.

Because once you have those numbers in your head, ninety seconds with a wheelie bin is not a good deed. It is an absurdity. It is a rounding error attached to a rounding error, and doing it while that is going on somewhere else feels, and you have never said this to anybody, faintly obscene.

So you stopped. And nobody has said anything, and number eleven has managed, and you feel worse than you did before.

Jesus defends a small act against people with a better argument

There is a scene where a woman does something that is, on any reasonable accounting, a waste, and the room says so out loud, and their objection is not stupid. It is the objection you have been making to yourself for fourteen months. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it true in you.

They said the ointment could have been sold and given to the poor. That is a real argument. There were poor people and the ointment was worth a year of wages and their maths was correct.

And He answers it in a single sentence that does not engage with the maths at all.

She hath done what she could.Mark 14:8

That is the whole defense. Not: this will have a greater impact than you think. Not: actually the accounting is wrong. Not a scale argument of any kind.

She did what was in her hand to do, and He took it as complete.

So take this now, fourteen months in. You are not required to justify an act by its size. The written word records the Lord Himself refusing to let a small thing be measured against a larger need, and the Holy Spirit is the one who preserved that sentence for people exactly like you, and doing a small good near you has never once been obscene.

The scale is real and it is not yours

Now let me hold both halves, because I am not going to tell you the numbers do not matter. You would stop listening and you would be right to.

The thing you have been reading about is real and it is enormous and it should not be shrunk to make you comfortable. Anybody who tells you to stop looking at it is asking you to become a smaller person, and God is not in that. The written word settled that, and His Spirit has been carrying it ever since.

But look at what has actually happened to you.

You have been holding a scale no human being was built to hold, and a person holding an unliftable weight cannot also bend down and pick up a light one. That is not a moral failure, it is mechanics. Your arms are full. Scripture says so plainly, and the Holy Spirit does not read it differently on a bad day.

And here is the cruel part: putting the small thing down did nothing whatsoever for the large one. Number eleven's bins not being done has not helped a single person anywhere on this earth. All that happened is that a street lost a woman who used to do a thing.

You have a part and it is your size. His word lets a small act stand complete without measuring it against a larger need, and the Holy Spirit is the one who hands out parts, and He has never yet given a person the whole world to carry.

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

Read the accounts of that work and what strikes you is the size of the individual actions. A meal. A bed. Somebody walked home in the dark. Somebody sat up with somebody.

And these were not people with a small view of the world. They knew perfectly well what was happening in that city and in that country. They simply understood something that has got lost since, which is that the answer to an enormous need is not an enormous response from each person. It is a near response from each person, repeated, in enough places.

They did the street they were on, and it is one of the reasons anybody has heard of that hall.

You are on a street. The written word lets what is in your hand stand, and the Holy Spirit put your gate where it is.