The Pitch By the Gate

Gates open at six for sellers and seven for buyers, and every person who has ever sold at a car boot knows that the seven part is a fiction, because there are people over the fence at ten past six going through your boxes while you are still getting the table up.

She had the pitch by the gate for six years. First row, second in. It is the best spot on that field and everybody knew it was hers, and it was hers because she got there at five past six every single Saturday for six years, and there is no other mechanism by which anything becomes yours at a car boot.

Trestle table. A groundsheet for the bigger stuff. A tin for the change with a rubber band round it. She was good at it. She could price anything in about two seconds and she never once got into an argument, and she had regulars who came looking for her.

She has not been for three years.

She drove past the field one Saturday last spring, going somewhere else, and slowed down without deciding to, and saw a man with a gazebo on her pitch, which is against the spirit of the thing but not against any rule, and she drove on.

And what she took away from that morning was not annoyance. It was a sentence that has been with her ever since, and the sentence is that there is no place left for her anywhere.

Now let me say who I am speaking to before anything else. Today I am speaking to you, the one whose weight belongs to what somebody else did. I will not ask you what it was, not now and not later, and nothing here wants the thing itself.

And before you brace for it: nobody here is setting you a pace. Stopping going is not a sin, this site will never call it one, and there is no timetable in this message.

The command comes with its reason attached

There is a line in Isaiah that has been used as a rallying cry so often that people have stopped noticing it is two clauses and that the second one is doing all the work.

Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the LORD is risen upon thee.Isaiah 60:1

Arise, shine. That is the command, and quoted on its own it is a burden, because it sounds like an instruction to produce something out of yourself at seven o'clock on a Saturday morning when you have nothing.

For thy light is come. That is the reason, and it is joined to the command by a word that means because.

The light is not something the rising produces. The light has already arrived. The rising is what a person does in response to an arrival that has already happened, which is an entirely different action from generating light in the dark.

And notice the tense. Is come. Not is coming. Not will come when you are ready. It is here, on the field, before you are up.

You are being called to get up into a light that has already arrived, and you were never asked to make any of it yourself. I am not offering you a warm reading. The written word joins the reason to the command with a causal word, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a woman driving past a field on a Saturday.

A pitch and a place are not the same thing

Now the sentence you took away from that morning, because I want to take it apart carefully rather than argue you out of it.

You lost a pitch. That is true. A pitch at a car boot sale belongs to whoever gets there at five past six, and you stopped getting there, and a man with a gazebo now does. That is simply how a field works and it is not a judgment about anybody.

You did not lose a place. Those are two different things and the sentence welded them together on a road at forty miles an hour.

A pitch is allocated by arrival. A place is given by God, and Isaiah is speaking to a whole people who had lost everything allocated to them, every field and every wall, and He does not restore their pitches in that chapter. He says the light has come and tells them to get up in it.

You have a place that was never allocated by who got there first, and you were never in danger of losing it to a man with a gazebo. Scripture speaks that chapter over people who had lost the lot, and it is His Spirit, not a good spot on a field, who makes a place feel like a place.