It Came to the Next Valley

The story belongs to the next valley and everybody in Bethan's valley knows it.

Nineteen hundred and something. A winter. It started in the chapel down there and by the spring the shops had shut early on the Tuesdays and there were men coming up out of the pits and going straight into meetings without washing, and there is a photograph in a book of about four hundred people standing outside a building that seats a hundred and sixty.

People come to look at that chapel. There is a small plaque.

Bethan's valley is nine miles over the ridge and had nothing.

Not nothing at all, in fairness. Her great-grandmother said there were more people about in the chapel that year and some singing in the street once. But nothing that anybody wrote down, and nothing anybody comes to look at, and no plaque.

She is sixty-three and has been in that building her whole life and she has never once said out loud what she is about to tell you, because it sounds ungrateful and small.

She minds.

Not about the next valley particularly. She likes the next valley. Her son married a girl from down there.

She minds that it came nine miles away and not here, and she has been carrying a small cold thing about it for most of her adult life, and it comes up at odd moments: when somebody mentions it, when the coach comes past with people on it, and once, badly, at a funeral, when a man from over there said something perfectly kind about heritage.

And under the minding is something worse and quieter, which is a suspicion.

If it went there and not here, there must be a reason. And the reasons available to her are all about this valley or about the people in it or, when she is tired, about her, and she has never worked out how to think about it without one of those three landing somewhere.

So she has not thought about it. She has just carried it, for about forty years, in a small cold pocket, and gone on making the tea and opening the building and doing everything a woman does for sixty-three years in one chapel.

And you may have your own next valley. Another town, another church, another family, another year. Somewhere that got the story, and a small cold pocket you have never emptied out.

The one sentence Jesus gives about this closes off every reason

Let me take that off you first, my love, because you have carried it forty years and it was never yours.

You are not the reason it went to the next valley. Neither is your chapel and neither are your people. You never were. Scripture takes the movement of the Spirit entirely out of the realm of things anybody can account for, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself, not the merit of a place, who decides where He blows. Set that pocket down on this table. It is heavy, and there is nothing in it that was ever yours.

Now hear the sentence, and hear how completely it settles the question.

The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.John 3:8

You cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.

That is not a poetic flourish. It is a closing of the file. Jesus is telling a man who wants a mechanism that there is not one available, and He is doing it kindly.

Which means the suspicion you have carried for forty years has never once had anything to stand on. There is no reason list. There is no measure the next valley passed and yours failed. Nobody in that photograph earned it and nobody in your chapel forfeited it, and Scripture will not let anybody build a ladder out of it in either direction.

You are free of that today. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who moves where He pleases, and nine miles of ridge has never been a judgement on anybody.

Now let me be careful, because I am not going to leave you in a different ditch.

Nothing here says it was not real down there. It was. Men came up out of those pits and their families noticed for the rest of their lives, and that is a work of God and it is not to be shrugged at because it did not come here.

And nothing here promises you a winter of your own. I cannot promise that, and I will not, and if anybody ever suggested that enough of something would produce one, they were wrong and you may set that down as well.

Here is the tender part, and I say it gently, because forty years is a long time to carry a thing you were never allowed to name. The cold pocket is not ingratitude and it is not smallness. It is grief with nowhere to go. Scripture makes room for that, and His Spirit is not embarrassed by it.

You have been grieving a thing you never had, in a place where nobody would think you had the right to grieve it, and so it went into a pocket instead of into God.

You are able to hand it over now, this afternoon, at your own table. Scripture says the wind blows where it pleases, and His Spirit is the one who does the blowing, and He has never once weighed a valley to decide.