The Nod in the Lift

There are eleven floors and Faisal has been on the seventh for four years.

The man from the flat opposite gets in at the seventh most mornings too, and they do the whole thing. The small lift of the chin. The half smile. Sometimes a comment about the weather or the lift itself, which breaks often enough to be a subject.

Twelve seconds, twice a day, for four years.

Faisal does not know his name.

He knows other things. He knows the man works shifts, because of the bag. He knows there is a daughter, because of the scooter in the hall at Christmas. He knows he had a bad winter last year, because the ambulance came once at four in the morning and Faisal stood at his own door with the chain on and watched them take somebody down in a chair and did not open the door and has thought about it since.

And here is the part that has begun to bother him, because Faisal is not a cold man and everybody who knows him would tell you so.

Three weeks ago he sat on a plane next to a stranger for six hours and by the end of it he knew about that man's divorce, his brother, and the reason he had stopped playing the trumpet. Faisal talked about God for about twenty minutes somewhere over the water, warmly, honestly, without any strain at all, and the man took his number and has messaged twice.

Six hours with a stranger at thirty thousand feet.

Four years and about seven hundred lift journeys with a man who lives eleven steps from his own front door, and he could not tell you his name if the building was on fire.

He worked out why on a Sunday afternoon, sitting on the floor by the radiator, and the reason is not shyness and it is not busyness.

It is that the stranger on the plane was leaving. Whatever Faisal said, he would land, and they would part, and the whole thing was sealed at both ends.

The man across the landing does not leave. He is there tomorrow, and next month, and at four in the morning when the ambulance comes. Anything said in that lift has to be lived beside.

And so Faisal is generous with people he will never see again and careful with the person he will see forever, and he has started to suspect this is exactly backwards.

And I think you know this, because you have your own landing, and yours may be a fence, or a desk, or a school gate.

The word for the one who is near is the same word for the one who is unlike you

Let me take something off you before we go further, because you have been carrying it up and down that lift and it was never yours.

You are not being sent to convert anybody. You never were. Scripture puts the whole weight of neighbor love on nearness rather than on results, and it is the Holy Spirit, not your courage in a lift, who opens a person to God. Set that down here on the landing. It is heavy and it has kept you nodding for four years.

Now hear the story, because it is a story about proximity and everybody remembers the wrong part of it.

A man asks who his neighbor is, hoping to have the list narrowed. Jesus tells him about a road, and a man beaten and left, and two people who saw him and went round, and then this.

But a Samaritan, as he travelled, came where the man was; and when he saw him, he took pity on him.Luke 10:33

Came where the man was.

That is the whole hinge of the story and it is not a speech and it is not a technique. He came where the man was. The two who did not stop had the correct beliefs and were going somewhere religious. The one who stopped closed the distance.

And notice what he does at the end of it. He does not preach. He binds up, he pays, he says he will come back. The neighboring is entirely made of small physical proximity.

You have this in you. Right now, on the seventh floor, in an ordinary week. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who is already at work in the man across the landing, long before you knew there was anything to say.

Now let me be careful here, because there is a ditch on both sides of this road and I have no interest in putting you in either.

Nobody here is telling you to walk across and start a conversation about eternity with a man carrying a shift bag. That is not the ask and it has never been the ask, and if anybody ever made you feel that a landing is a target, they were wrong and you can set that down too.

And nobody is telling you your six hours on that plane were false. They were not. That was a real kindness and God is entirely able to use it.

The point is only this. You have been treating nearness as a difficulty, and Scripture treats nearness as the whole point, and His Spirit does every part of it that comes after.

Here is the tender part, and I say it as gently as I can. What has kept you at twelve seconds is not coldness. It is that you know the cost of being known by somebody who is not leaving.

You are able for that. Not one day when you are braver. Now, this week, with the same voice you used at thirty thousand feet. Scripture says the neighbor is the one who came where the man was, and the same Spirit who moved you to speak on that plane is the one standing on your landing, and He has never once made a man's usefulness conditional on his nerve.

And I will say the honest half, because it belongs here. You stood behind a chained door at four in the morning and watched a man in a chair. Nobody is blaming you for that and I am certainly not. But you have carried it since, and the carrying is not going to be fixed by anything except one name said out loud.