Six Weeks On A Street Of Strangers

Six weeks tomorrow, and he has had four conversations.

He has counted them, which tells you something. The man opposite about a parking space, twice. A woman with a pushchair about the recycling day, which is Thursday here and was Tuesday where they came from. And an older man at the end who told him, at some length and with real feeling, about a tree.

He is forty seven and he has moved for work and the house is fine and the move was right and he would do it again.

What he had not accounted for is how finished everything looks.

That is the thing. It is not that people are cold. It is that they are already arranged. There is a group who stand at the corner on a Friday. There are two families who clearly do things together and shout across the road in shorthand. There is a woman who runs something involving a hall and a rota, and everyone knows about the rota.

He is standing outside a machine that has been running for twenty years and has no obvious slot in it.

So he has done the sum, quietly, the way he does sums. He reckons two years. Two years of being the new one, and then somewhere in the third year it will have quietly stopped being true, and until then he will be pleasant, and patient, and largely alone on a road with sixty houses on it.

He is not miserable about it. That is almost the trouble. He has accepted it, and filed it, and got on with the garden.

The bounds were set before you signed anything

Put the spade down, because there is a sentence Paul says to a crowd of strangers in a foreign city, and it is about your road.

He is standing in Athens. He is the newcomer, addressing people whose arrangements go back centuries, and this is what he tells them about how anybody ends up anywhere.

And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.Acts 17:26

The times before appointed. The bounds of their habitation.

That is not a poetic flourish. That is a statement that the where and the when of a person's life are not accidents of an estate agent. Somebody determined them, and the determining happened before the appointing, and the appointing happened before you drove up with a van.

Hear this in your own garden. You are not a man serving a waiting period, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture says the bounds of your dwelling were determined, and the Holy Spirit did not put you on that road for two years of pleasant patience before you are permitted to matter on it.

Now the two year sum. Let me look at it with you, because it is a good sum and it is answering the wrong question.

You have calculated how long it takes to be absorbed. That is probably about right. Streets do absorb people and it does take a couple of years and you are not wrong about the arithmetic, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for the arithmetic to finish before He does anything on that road.

But absorption is not the thing. You are not waiting to become a resident of that road. You have been one since the day the boxes came off the van, what is written puts the boundary on the ground rather than around the group who already know each other, and the Holy Spirit is the one who drew it.

The people at the corner on a Friday did not confer that on anybody. The rota does not confer it. There is nothing to be admitted to, because the parish idea, the old one, was always this: the line is drawn around the ground, and everybody standing inside it is in, from their first night.

Hear this too, and let it change what you do on Saturday. You are not outside anything, and Scripture is what says so. What is written appointed the times and the bounds, and the Spirit of God is the one who set you down there, so a man on his own road is never a man waiting for entry.

And now the practical part, which is going to cost you about ninety seconds.

Six weeks is the best moment you will ever have and it is closing. Right now, being new is a legitimate reason to introduce yourself to anybody. In eight months it will be faintly odd. In two years it will require an explanation.

Being the new one is not the obstacle. It is the doorway, and it is open for about another month.

So go and use it while you have got it. Not a strategy. A name, given to somebody over a fence, before the window shuts, on the strength of a written word that says the bounds were appointed and the Holy Spirit who set you inside them.