Four Years And I Do Not Know Her Name

She could tell you the name of a woman she met once at a conference in Leeds.

She could tell you the names of about forty people she has never met, because they are on her phone, and she knows their dogs and their kitchens and the state of their marriages, roughly, from context.

She cannot tell you the name of the woman in flat six.

Four years. The woman in flat six is somewhere in her sixties and has a wheeled shopping trolley with a tartan pattern, and she is on the landing at unpredictable hours, and every single time they meet there is a nod. Not a cold nod. A warm one, actually, with a small lift of the eyebrows, and once a whole sentence about the bins.

Four years of the warm nod.

The window for asking closed at about eight weeks. She knows exactly when it happened, because there was a moment in the second month where the woman said something about the heating and it would have been the most natural thing in the world to say, sorry, I am Ellie, and she did not, and after that it became a thing that could not be raised without admitting how long it had gone on.

She thinks about it more than she would admit. Especially on Sundays.

Because on Sundays she drives twenty five minutes to a church full of people she chose, who are like her, whom she genuinely loves, and she comes back at half past twelve, and there is the woman with the tartan trolley coming up the stairs, and there is the nod.

Last week she got as far as opening her mouth. What came out was: turned out nice.

He answered a question about categories with a question about proximity

Stand on the landing with me a minute, because there is a conversation in Luke that is exactly about this, and the famous part of it is not the part that helps you.

A man asks Jesus who his neighbor is. It is a sorting question. He wants the boundary drawn so he knows the size of the obligation.

And the story comes back, and everybody remembers the story. But watch how it ends, because He does not answer the question that was asked.

Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?Luke 10:36

He flips it. The man asked, who counts as my neighbor. Jesus asks, which one acted like one.

And the answer, in the story, is decided entirely by who was on that road. Not by who was suitable. Not by who was compatible. The Samaritan was the neighbor because he was there and he stopped.

Hear this on your own landing. You are not short of people, and the written word is what settles that. Scripture answers the question of who your neighbor is by pointing at whoever is on the road, and the Holy Spirit put a woman with a tartan trolley eleven feet from your front door four years ago and has walked her past you a thousand times.

Now let me say the thing about Sundays, and I want to be careful, because there is nothing wrong with your church and nobody is asking you to leave it.

You chose those people, and choosing is not a sin. Every one of us assembles a life out of people we picked, and the people we pick are like us, because that is what picking is.

But a person you chose is a person you could unchoose. That is not cynicism, it is just structurally true, and it means every chosen friendship carries a small permanent invisible condition: this holds as long as we still fit.

The woman in flat six carries no condition at all. You did not select her for anything. She cannot fail to remain your sort of person, because she was never your sort of person, and that is precisely what makes her yours in a way none of the others are.

Hear this too, because it will take the shame off the four years. You are not too late, and Scripture is what says so. What is written never once puts a time limit on a neighbor, and the Holy Spirit has not been keeping score of the nods, and the parish idea has always been that the people near you are given rather than gathered.

And now the eight week window, because that is the thing actually stopping you.

You believe that asking now would require you to admit something embarrassing. It would not. Nobody who has been nodded at warmly for four years is keeping an account of it. She almost certainly does not know your name either, and she has almost certainly had exactly this thought on the stairs, at a slightly different hour.

There are two people on that landing with the same problem and neither of them knows.