The market opens at nine and the stallholders are there at eight, and the hour in between is the best hour of the week and none of the customers will ever see it.
Vans backed up along one side. Awnings going up in the order they always go up. The bloke with the cheese has a system involving two milk crates that he will explain to anybody. Somebody has brought a flask and it is going round, and somebody else has brought the good kind of pastry from the place two streets over and is being extremely popular about it.
Twelve crates off the van. Her hands are cold and will be until about ten.
This is the fourth year. It is not a fortune and it was never going to be, and she is one of the ones people come for, and she knows that, and it is a good thing to know at eight in the morning in the cold.
And underneath it there is a sum she has been doing for a long time.
The sum is about progress. Four years since the worst of it. She expected, by now, to be somewhere in particular. Not fixed. She never expected fixed. But further along than she is, and she is not, and the conclusion she has drawn from that is not that she is going slowly.
The conclusion is that she must have come off the path altogether, and simply not noticed, because a person on the right road would be further up it than this.
Sit on the tailgate with me. Today I am speaking to the one carrying something nobody knows, who took it to God straight a long time back and meant every word, and has been reading her own pace as evidence.
And I will say the honest thing first: I am not promising you a schedule. This message does not do that. What I will do is read you a proverb about a path.
The path itself is the thing that brightens
Here is the line, and the grammar in it is the whole answer.
But the path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day.Proverbs 4:18
Look at what is described as brightening.
The path. Not the walker. The subject of that sentence is the road, and the road is the thing that shines more and more, and the person walking on it is not even mentioned in the clause.
Which means the brightening is not a report on how well anybody is doing.
And more and more is a gradient. It is not a switch. There is no line on that road where a person crosses from dark into light, and therefore no line a person can be measured against and found to be short of.
A gradient has no failing side.
You are on a path that is brightening by its own nature, and you were never the one producing the light on it. I am not being lenient with you. The written word makes the path the subject of the verb, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it onto a street at eight in the morning with twelve crates on the ground.
And you have been on it the whole time
Now let me deal with the sum, and I want to name what it has been doing to you.
You have been treating your position on the road as evidence about whether you are on the road. Those are two different questions, and the second one is not answered by the first.
A person twenty yards along a road at dawn is on exactly the same road as a person two miles up it at nine in the morning. The one at twenty yards is not off it. They are on it, in the dark end of it, and the road under both of their feet is the same road and is doing the same thing.
And the destination in that proverb is not a state of the walker either. It is a day. Unto the perfect day. The road is going toward a morning, and mornings are not achievements.
You are on the road at the hour you are actually at, and you were never off it for being early in the light. Scripture makes the destination a day rather than a standard, and it is His Spirit, not four faster years, who keeps a person's feet on a road that is doing its own brightening.
So here is the thing, and it is one ordinary act.
Choose one ordinary thing today, in advance, and do it in full view with your head up.
Stand at the front of the stall rather than behind the crates. Take the pastry when it comes round and say something to the man with the milk crate system, who would like to be asked about it.
Choose it now, at eight, before the market opens, so it is not a matter of nerve at half past ten.
And hear this, because it is the whole guardrail on this message. I am not grading your day and I am not measuring your four years. If today goes well, good. If it does not, nothing is being marked. And a month where you feel further back than you were undoes nothing, and would not mean you had come off anything.
And one plain thing first, because a page is not always the help a person needs. If what runs under this has gone past a heavy stretch into hours when being here at all feels like too much, tell one living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line: 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. You never have to tell anybody the thing itself in order to ask for help staying.
You are on a path that is shining more and more, and you were on it through every one of the four years you were doing the sum. That is what the written word settles in Proverbs 4, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it off a page and onto a street with the awnings going up.
Declare this over yourself
You are in Christ and Christ is in you, and that is the ground under every word coming next. This is not a feeling being worked up. It is agreement out loud with what a proverb says about a road, and how today goes, and where I am in a year, the outcome is His. The written word is what settled it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it.
- Crates coming off the van at eight, you are twelve boxes and a cold pair of hands. You are the best hour of the week and no customer will ever see you. The written word says the path shines more and more, and I am setting up at the front of the stall.
- Sum I have been doing about how far along I am, you answered a question nobody asked with evidence about a different one, and I set you down in the name of Jesus. A gradient has no failing side. Twenty yards along a road at dawn is on the road.
- Lord, the path is the thing that brightens and the brightening was never mine to produce. I am standing at the front today and asking about the milk crates. And my feet have been on it through every one of the four years.
Proverbs 4:18
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.