Maps Out at the Gate

The meeting point is a gate at the far end of a car park with a noticeboard beside it that has had the same faded thing about ground nesting birds on it for years, and everybody arrives between ten to and ten past.

Third Sunday of the month. Eleven or twelve of them, boots on the tailgate, and the particular business of a walking group getting ready, which takes twenty-five minutes no matter what anybody says.

Somebody always has a paper map. There are always two people who have looked at the forecast and disagree about it. There is a woman who brings an extra flask because somebody always forgets, and she has never once said out loud that she does it on purpose. There is a discussion about whether to do the ridge or go round, and this discussion is a ritual, and the group always does the ridge.

He walked with them for seven years.

Since the spring he has driven to that car park twice, on the third Sunday, at ten to, and parked at the other end, and sat there with the engine off and watched them do the twenty-five minutes, and driven home before they set off.

He would not be able to tell you what stops him getting out. There is something in him that tells him to stay where he is and keep quiet, and it is not a reasoned thing, and it arrives before any reasoning does.

Sit with me a while. Today I am speaking to the one who did something, a long way back, brought it to God straight and meant it entirely, and has something in him that says stay put.

And before you brace: nobody is setting you a pace here. Not going is not a sin, this site will not treat it as one, and there is no timetable anywhere in this message.

The crowd changed its mind in one verse

There is a man in Mark's Gospel sitting by a road outside Jericho, and he starts shouting, and the crowd tells him to be quiet.

That is worth sitting with for a second. Not one person. The crowd. Many of them charged him that he should hold his peace, and the word is a strong one, and he had been sitting by that road long enough for everybody to have an opinion about the amount of noise he was entitled to make.

And then Jesus stands still, and says call him.

And they call the blind man, saying unto him, Be of good comfort, rise; he calleth thee.Mark 10:49

Same crowd. Same people who had been telling him to keep quiet. Now saying be of good comfort, get up, He is calling you.

Nothing changed in the man. He did not become more presentable between those two verses. He did not explain himself, and nobody asked him to. What changed was that Jesus called him, and the calling reorganized the entire road in one sentence.

You are being called by Christ Himself, and you were called before anything in you or around you changed. I am not offering you a nice observation. The written word puts the crowd's reversal immediately after the call and gives no other cause for it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it into a man in a car park with the engine off.

What the voice that says stay put is not

Now the thing in you that says keep quiet and stay where you are.

I am not going to tell you to fight it. That has been tried, in the car, twice this spring, and it did not work, and adding a failed fight to the pile is not what you need from me.

I want to say something about what it is instead, and I want to be plain and not dramatic about it.

It is not God. That is the whole of what I want to establish. In that account, the voice telling the man to be quiet was in the crowd, and the voice calling him was the Lord's, and those two were not the same voice and they never have been.

You may not be able to stop the first one. You are not required to. But you are allowed to know which one is which, and knowing that is most of the freedom there is in this.

You are called by a voice that is not the one telling you to stay put, and you were never listening to God when you listened to that. Scripture puts the two voices in the same paragraph and keeps them entirely separate, and it is His Spirit, not an argument won in a parked car, who makes a man able to tell them apart.