The People Between Me And My Church

Forty minutes there and forty minutes back, every Sunday, for nine years.

She is not complaining. She loves that church. She was carried by that church through a year she does not talk about much, and she would drive twice as far, and if you suggested that the driving was a problem she would gently and firmly tell you it is not.

The thing that happened, happened at a set of traffic lights.

She was stopped at the top of a hill about halfway, in the rain, behind a bus, and she looked out of the passenger window at a parade of shops she has driven past somewhere in the region of nine hundred times.

A launderette. A place selling phone cases and doing key cutting. A greengrocer with the fruit out under an awning in the rain, and a man in an apron moving a box.

And she realized, sitting at those lights, that she did not know the name of the road. Not the shops, not the church whose spire is behind them, not the name of the road itself, after nine years and nine hundred crossings.

It was not guilt exactly. It was stranger than guilt. It was the feeling of having driven through the same four miles of other people's whole lives, twice a week, for nine years, at speed, thinking about the traffic.

The light changed and she went on and got there in good time and sang and meant every word of it.

But that greengrocer has been in her head since Tuesday, and she cannot work out why, and it is beginning to be one of those things that will not go away until it is dealt with.

Seek the welfare of the city where you actually are

Pull over a minute, because there is a letter in Jeremiah written to people who were absolutely certain that where they were living was not their real life.

They were in Babylon. They had not chosen it. Everything that mattered to them was four hundred miles away and they were counting the days until they could get back to it, and their whole inner life was pointed somewhere else.

And God writes to them, and this is what He says.

And seek the peace of the city whither I have caused you to be carried away captives, and pray unto the Lord for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace.Jeremiah 29:7

Seek the peace of that city. Pray for it. The one you did not choose. The one you are only passing through.

Hear this at the lights. You are not being told to love your church less, and the written word is what settles that, because it never once tells the exiles to stop longing for Jerusalem. Scripture tells them to pray for Babylon as well, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has had you crossing those four miles nine hundred times, and He does not do anything nine hundred times by accident.

Now let me name what has actually happened, because it is not a fault and I do not want you carrying it as one.

A road becomes invisible. That is not a moral failure, nothing written in Scripture calls it one, and the Holy Spirit is not accusing you of it. It is how attention works: anything you cross in order to get somewhere stops registering as a place and starts registering as distance. Every commuter on earth does it. You have not been callous. You have been traveling.

But something in you sat up at those lights, and I would take that seriously, because it arrived without you arranging it and it has not gone away since Tuesday.

Hear this too. You are not required to move anything, and Scripture is what says so. What is written tells the exiles to pray for the city while they were still exiles, without instructing one of them to change where they belonged, and the Spirit of God is not asking you to leave a church that carried you through a year you do not talk about.

He is asking for the four miles as well as the destination. Both. That is all.

And here is the thing that makes it simple.

You cannot befriend four miles. You cannot join a road. But you can pray for it, out loud, at forty miles an hour, by name, and that is exactly what the letter says to do: seek the peace of it, and pray unto the Lord for it.

That greengrocer with the box in the rain has a name. You will not learn it. He has a wife, or he does not; a lease he is worried about, or a good year; a knee that is going. You will never know one detail and it does not matter in the slightest, because the written word did not ask the exiles to know Babylon. It asked them to want its peace and to say so to God.

Nine hundred crossings. You have been given a parish four miles long by the Holy Spirit and you thought it was a commute.