The Only One Of Me On This Road

She has lived there five years and everybody is lovely, and that is not a complaint she can make to anybody.

The people on that road are kind. They are genuinely, actively kind. They bring her post round when it goes to the wrong number. They put her bin out once when she was away. A woman at the top asked her, in the first month, with obvious care, whether she was settling in all right, and asked twice more that year.

She is the only Black woman on the road. There is one other family two streets over and they smile at each other in the shop like people who know something.

Here is the thing she cannot say without it sounding like ingratitude, so she has never said it.

Nobody has ever asked her a boring question.

Nobody asks her about the parking, or whether she thinks the bin day is going to change, or what she paid for the guttering, or any of the flat, unimportant, entirely ordinary things she hears them asking each other over the fences all summer.

She gets careful questions. She gets thoughtful ones. She gets asked how she is with a slight extra weight on the word, and she gets asked whether she feels welcome, and she has been asked twice in five years about a place she has never been to.

She is treated like a guest at an event that has been going on for a very long time and will still be going on when she leaves.

The strange thing, and the thing she turns over at the sink, is that this is not hostility. She has known hostility and this is not it. It is careful. It is people being extremely careful, for five years, without stopping.

And what careful means, in the end, is that not one person on that road has any idea what she is actually like.

She named Him for what He did, and what He did was see her

Come and sit on the step, because there is a woman in Genesis who was the only one of herself in every room she was ever in, and she is the first person in the whole Bible to give God a name.

She is a slave. She is foreign, pregnant, running, sitting by a spring in a desert with no standing anywhere in that household and no legal claim on anything, and the angel of the Lord finds her there and talks to her, and afterwards she says this.

And she called the name of the Lord that spake unto her, Thou God seest me.Genesis 16:13

Thou God seest me.

Not thou God helpest me. Not thou God art kind to me, although He was. She reaches for the thing that had actually happened, which is that somebody had looked at her and known who she was and spoken to her as herself, in a desert, where she was nobody's business.

Hear this on your own front step. You are not invisible on that road, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture has the first naming of God in the whole book given by a woman nobody was looking at, and the Holy Spirit has been in that street for five years knowing exactly who lives at your number.

Now let me name what careful actually is, because you have been trying to name it at the sink for a long time and it deserves a straight answer.

Careful is what people do when they are managing a category rather than meeting a person. It is not malice. Most of it is fear of getting it wrong, which is a real fear and a well meant one, and the whole thing is running on good intentions.

And its effect is precisely the opposite of its intention. Careful keeps a person at the exact distance at which you can never be embarrassed by them, and it is at that distance that nobody ever finds out what anybody is like.

Hear this too. You are not ungrateful, and Scripture is what says so. What is written has a woman naming God for seeing her rather than for being nice to her, and the Spirit of God draws no distinction whatever between the categories that street is being careful about, and a woman who wants an ordinary conversation is not asking for too much.

And now the part that is genuinely in your hands, because most of this is not.

You cannot make anybody ask you a boring question. But you can hand one over, unprompted, and a boring fact given away is the fastest way through a careful distance there has ever been.

Not a speech. Not a conversation about the road. A flat, useless, ordinary sentence, offered over a gate: that guttering man was a fortnight late and charged me for the ladder.

It sounds like nothing. It is not nothing. It is the sentence a person says to somebody they are not managing, and hearing it come from you gives the person at the gate permission they have been too anxious to take for five years.

Somebody has to go first, and it is not fair that it is you, and it is also true that the written word puts a desert woman in front of God and she is the one who speaks first.