The Same Six Parents

Twenty past three and there is a stretch of pavement about thirty feet long between the gate and the corner, and the same people stand on it every afternoon in more or less the same arrangement, the way birds land on the same bit of wire.

Six of them, on a good day. The one who is always first and has a dog. The two who arrived on the same day in September four years ago and are now welded together. A grandfather who does three days a week and knows everybody's business and is entirely trusted with it. A woman who takes calls the whole time and mouths sorry at everybody and is forgiven every day.

And her.

Ten minutes, five afternoons a week, thirty-nine weeks a year. Which is, if you sit down and work it out, about thirty-two hours a year on one stretch of pavement with the same six people, and she has been doing it for four years.

She is easy there. That is the thing worth saying. She laughs, she carries the spare book bag, she is the one who noticed when the grandfather had a bad week. Nobody standing on that pavement would guess anything at all.

And in the middle of it, at least once most afternoons, a sentence goes through her that has been going through her for a very long time. It is about a stretch of years in her own life, and what it says is that nothing good has ever come out of that, and nothing ever will, and the file on it is closed.

That stretch belongs to what another person did.

Let me say who I am speaking to before I say anything else. Today I am speaking to you, the one whose weight belongs entirely to somebody else's doing. And here is the sentence that matters most, first. I am not going to ask you to tell anybody. Not today, not eventually, not to a friend or a leader or a group. I will not ask you to describe anything, to anyone, ever. Nothing here wants the thing itself.

God says out loud what He is after in the dark

There is a verse in Isaiah spoken over a man who did not know God at all, and God explains His own purpose in it, which He does not often do.

And I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the LORD, which call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel.Isaiah 45:3

I want to be careful with this, because it has been misused on people like you and I am not going to add to that.

This verse does not say the dark was good. It does not say the unlit stretch of a life was a gift, or a plan, or a lesson, and anybody who has told you that was wrong and I will say so plainly. God does not need to have authored a thing in order to walk into it.

What it says is that God goes into unlit places and does not come out empty handed, and then it tells you His purpose clause, and the purpose is not the treasure.

That thou mayest know that I, the LORD, which call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel.

What He is after in the dark is that a person should know He is the one who knows their name.

You are called by your name by the God who goes into unlit places, and you were known by name in the stretch you have written off. I am not offering you a silver lining. The written word puts the naming in the purpose clause of that verse, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it off a page and puts it into a woman standing on thirty feet of pavement.

The file on that stretch is not yours to close

Here is the second thing, and it is smaller and more practical.

You closed a file. You did it years ago and you did it for good reasons, and it has held.

But a closed file is a ruling, and rulings need jurisdiction, and you do not have jurisdiction over what God does or does not do with a period of your own life. Neither does the person who did what they did. That decision sits with Somebody else entirely and He has not communicated it to you.

I am not asking you to reopen anything or to go looking. I am asking you to notice that the closing was done by a hand with no authority, and that a great deal of energy has gone into keeping shut a door that was never yours to lock.

You are held by a God who has not closed the file you closed, and you were never the one with the standing to rule on it. Scripture says He works all things according to the counsel of His own will, and it is His Spirit, not a decision made years ago at a hard time, who has the last word on a stretch of a life.