The Ones You Did Not Pick

The power went at twenty past two on a Wednesday morning and the whole block came out onto the pavement.

Nobody had told them to. The heating had clicked off and the fridges had gone quiet and the strange total silence had woken people in a way that noise never does, and one by one the doors opened and there they all were, in coats over whatever they had been sleeping in, blinking under a streetlight that was also out.

And for about forty minutes it was the best street in the country.

Number twelve had a camping stove and made tea for everybody. The man from the ground floor turned out to have a wind up radio from 1994 and worked out that it was the substation and it was four streets wide. Somebody's grandmother got a folding chair brought down for her and held court on the pavement in a blanket like the mayor. Two teenagers who normally look through everybody went round every door on the top landing to check nobody was on their own with it. There was a woman crying quietly by the bins because her mother is on oxygen four miles away and about six people took that seriously at once and one of them drove her there.

You were out there. You know exactly what that felt like.

Then at ten past three the lights came back on all down the road at the same moment and everyone said the same three words and laughed, and the doors closed, and it has now been fourteen months and you have not had a conversation with any of them again.

The man from the ground floor puts your bin out. He has done it every Tuesday for two years. Not just yours, all of them, he does the whole row, he is out there at seven in his slippers with the dew on the pavement, and you have watched him do it from your window while your coffee cools, and you do not know his name.

You know the names of everyone in the room you drive forty minutes to on a Sunday. All of them. Their kids' names, their jobs, what they think about most things, which is largely what you think about most things, which is nine tenths of why you drive there and it is a good drive and they are good people.

But there is a man twelve feet under your own floor who touches your bin every week of his life and is, as far as your mouth is concerned, nobody.

The boundaries of your dwelling

Paul stood up in the most opinionated city in the world, in front of people who chose their company by argument the way you choose yours by taste, and he said something about geography that nobody expects to find in a sermon.

And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should reach for Him, if perhaps they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us.Acts 17, verses 26 and 27

Read it slowly, because it is doing something enormous in very few words.

He set the times. He set the boundaries of the dwellings. Where you live is inside a line that God drew, and the line has a purpose written into it, and the purpose is that people would reach out and find that He was never far off.

Not the people who agree with you. The people inside the line.

There was an idea, a long time ago, that got written onto a map. Somebody drew a boundary around a piece of ground and said that every single person living inside that boundary was, from that moment, somebody's responsibility. Not the ones who came in. Not the ones who signed anything, agreed with anything, or turned up. Everybody. The rude ones, the drunk ones, the ones who never came once in fifty years, the ones who had opinions about the man responsible for them. They were his because they were there.

That is a strange idea and it has never stopped being strange. Everything else in your life is chosen. Your friends are a taste. Your feed is a taste. The forty minute drive is a taste and there is nothing wrong with it, keep it, it is feeding you and you need feeding and I am not going to say one word against the people who love you at the other end of that road.

But taste has a limit, and here is where it shows.

A person you chose is a person you can unchoose. That is not cynicism, it is just true, and everybody knows it, which is why chosen company can be warm for years and still never once feel like ground under your feet. You are always, somewhere at the back, aware that you are there on terms, and the written word never put you on terms, and the Holy Spirit has not been keeping you here on any.

The man on the ground floor is not on terms. He was not selected. He did not apply. There is no version of the arrangement where he stops being the man below you because he says something you find unbearable at Christmas. He is simply, permanently, the nearest human being to your body, put there inside a boundary that God drew, and the only thing standing between you and him is that neither of you has said a name.

Forty minutes is not a fault. Twelve feet is the ache.

And notice what is written at the end of it, which is the tenderest thing in the whole passage, and it is the Holy Spirit who put it there. He is not far from each one of us. Not far from you. Not far from the woman crying by the bins. Not far from the man in the slippers with the dew on the pavement at seven in the morning. He was already there before you were, on the whole landing, in every flat, and the reaching out that verse describes is happening under your feet right now in a room you have never been in.