The Name Over the Fence

He can tell you the name of a village in northern Thailand.

He can tell you the name of the family that runs the little church there, and the name of the man who translates, and the name of the boy on the photograph on his fridge, and how old that boy is now, and what he wants to do when he leaves school. He prays for them on Tuesdays. He has been twice. He came back from the second trip and cried in the airport car park, which he has told nobody.

The man on the other side of his fence is called Dave.

He has known that for six years. He knows it because it is on the parcels, and because a delivery driver once shouted it, and because Dave's mother used to visit and would call it up the drive.

In six years he has said, to Dave, the following words. Morning. All right. Bit of a wind. Cheers. He has said cheers a great many times, mostly for bins.

He has never once said the man's name to his face.

There was a week in February when Dave's car did not move off the drive for four days, which has never happened, and the curtains at the front stayed shut past ten, and this man stood at his kitchen window with a cup of tea and looked at it for a while and thought, I hope he is all right.

Then he went to work.

And that Tuesday he prayed, by name, with real love in it, for a family eleven thousand miles away, and the closed curtains twelve feet from his own sink never came into it, because there is no category in his life for the man over the fence. That is not coldness. He would take his own coat off for Dave in a hard winter.

It is only that the far away ones have names, and the near one has a wall.

The only man who asked to go was sent home

There is a story that is mostly remembered for the loud part, and the ending gets skipped, and the ending is the whole thing.

A man has been living out among the tombs and everybody in the district has given up on him. Jesus comes across the water, and the man is set free, and by the time the town arrives he is sitting there dressed and in his right mind.

Then the boat is going. And the man asks, with everything in him, to go with Him.

This is the only person in the Gospels who volunteers for the mission field. He is the one with the story, the gratitude, the zeal, the freshly cleared calendar and nothing left in that town for him.

And Jesus says no.

Go home to your own people, and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how He has had mercy on you.Mark 5:19

Go home. To your own people. The men who have watched you for years and crossed the road. The relatives who stopped coming. The village that tried chains and gave up.

He wanted eleven thousand miles. He was given the length of his own lane.

Now hear me carefully, because this is exactly the place where an article like this usually goes wrong and starts laying weights on a person's back.

Nothing in this is a rebuke of Thailand. The boy on your fridge is not a distraction and the trips were not an evasion. That love is real, and it is the same fire that has always been at the bottom of this word, the fire in the ones who took good news and went straight to the chains with it and spent forty years there. That is your fire and I am not going to talk you out of it.

The trouble is not that you went far. It is that far has become the only direction you know how to love in.

And I think we both know why. It is not laziness and it is not cowardice in the ordinary sense.

Far away is safe because far away cannot see you on a Wednesday. You can love a village in northern Thailand wholeheartedly and never once be embarrassed on your own drive. Dave has seen you lose your temper putting a flat pack in the car. Dave has heard you shout at the football through an open window. The person nearest you has the most evidence, and every scrap of it feels like a disqualification, and so the nearest one becomes the last one.

So let me take the weight off before it settles.

You are not being sent to convert your neighbor this week. There is no script coming. There is no opening question you have to memorize, no plan, no target, no accounting of how many. Anybody who hands you one of those has turned a person into an item of work, and that is not what happened at that boat. Scripture sends you with a name and not with a script, and His Spirit does everything past it.

What happened at that boat is that a man was told to go and be a real person among people who already knew him, and say the truth when it came up.

And it starts smaller than you think. It starts at his name.

Because a name is the difference between a neighbor and a wall. Morning is what you say to a wall. Morning, Dave, is what you say to a man. It costs almost nothing, and it takes about a second, and it is the first sentence of every conversation that has ever mattered, and you have been standing behind it for six years. That small crossing is what the written word calls neighboring, and His Spirit carries the rest.