I Crossed the Road at Number Fourteen

He did it without deciding to. That is what he keeps coming back to.

Tuesday, about half five, coming up from the shop with a bag in each hand. And ahead of him, outside number fourteen, Bernie was out at her bins with her back to him, doing the thing she does where she takes a long time about it.

And Tom crossed the road.

Not obviously. He did not bolt. He waited for a car, crossed at a natural sort of angle, walked up the other side, crossed back at his own gate. Thirty seconds' detour. If you had filmed it you would have seen nothing at all.

But he knew what he had done before he was halfway across, and he stood in his own kitchen afterwards with the bags still in his hands, not putting them down.

Because on the Thursday of that same week, Tom had stood in front of about two hundred people in a hall two hours away and talked for twenty-five minutes about the thing he cares most about in the world, and he had been fine. Better than fine. He had loved it. Afterwards he stood at the side and talked to strangers for an hour and a half, and three of those conversations went deep, and he drove home at midnight completely alive.

Two hundred strangers. No problem.

Bernie at number fourteen. Long way round.

He has been at this address nine years. He knows her name and that is about it. He knows there was a husband once. He knows she has an opinion about the parking, because she has expressed it to the whole street. And he knows, without ever having been told, that she is on her own most of the time, because he can see her television through the front window at eleven at night.

And when he tries to explain to himself why he crossed, the reasons he comes up with are all thin. She talks a lot. He had frozen food. He was tired.

None of them are it.

The real one arrived that evening while he was washing up, and it was this. In that hall he is a man with something to say. On his own pavement he is just the bloke from number twenty, and if it goes badly there is no drive home. He lives here.

The platform is safe because it ends. The pavement does not end.

And I would guess you know your own version, and yours might not be a hall, but there will be somewhere you are brave and a street where you take the long way.

He gave the order and the order starts underfoot

Let me take something off you before anything else, because you have been carrying it up that road and it was never yours.

You are not being sent out to convert your street this month. You never were. Scripture hands you a witness rather than a result, and it is the Holy Spirit, not your nerve on a pavement, who does anything at all inside another person. Set that down in the kitchen with the bags. It is heavy and you have been carrying it since Tuesday.

Now hear the order Jesus actually gives, because we quote this one constantly and skip the first word in the list.

But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.Acts 1:8

Jerusalem. Then the region. Then everywhere.

Jerusalem is the city they are standing in. It is the streets they know, the people they will see tomorrow, the ones who watched them get it wrong. It is home, and He puts it first, and He puts the ends of the earth last.

We have got very good at the last one. Whole hearts are given to the ends of the earth, honestly and expensively, and God is not annoyed about that. But Jerusalem was first in the sentence, and Jerusalem is a woman at her bins with her back to you.

And notice the word He uses for what you are. Not salesman. Not persuader. Witness. Somebody who was there and says what they saw.

You are that. Right now, standing in your own kitchen with the shopping still in your hands. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who came on you to make it so, and He did not issue that with a geographical restriction that starts four doors down.

Now let me be careful, because there is a ditch on both sides of this road.

Nobody here is telling you to knock on Bernie's door tonight with a conversation about eternity. That is not the ask, it has never been the ask on this page, and if anyone ever put a target on your street and made your neighbors into a quota, that was wrong and you can put it down along with everything else.

And nobody is telling you the hall was vanity. It was not. You said true things to two hundred people and God is entirely able to use every word of it.

The point is the order, not the value.

Here is the tender part. What made you cross was not dislike of Bernie. It was that a platform has an exit and a street does not, and you have been managing the risk of being known by somebody permanent.

You are able for the permanent kind. Not one day when you have more in you. Now, this week, with the same voice that filled a hall on Thursday. Scripture starts the witness at home and His Spirit is the one who supplies the power for it, and He has never once measured a man by his nerve on his own pavement.

And I will say the honest half, because you would. Thirty seconds' detour cost you nothing on Tuesday and it has been in your chest for six days. That is the actual price, and it is always the one nobody sees.