The Street That Did Not Pick Me Either

Three years in April, and the street is perfectly nice to him.

He wants to be exact about that, because the story people expect is a different one and it is not his. Nobody has been unkind. The man at number nine put his bin back for him twice. A woman two doors up brought a card when his daughter was born and had written the baby's name inside, correctly, which he noticed and has not forgotten.

And yet.

He stands at his own gate some evenings, with the key in his hand, and has a feeling he has never been able to name properly and would be embarrassed to try. The nearest he has got is this: he feels like a guest who has been here a long time.

Not unwelcome. A guest. Someone whose presence is fine and is still, in some small permanent way, being permitted.

He has worked out that he is waiting for something. He has been waiting for three years and he could not tell you what it is. A moment. A gesture. Some unmistakable signal from the street that would settle it and let him stop standing at his own gate like a man at a doorway.

It has not come. And what has begun to worry him, this spring, is a suspicion that it is never going to come, and that the reason is not hostility but something duller: that nobody on that street is thinking about it at all, and there is no committee, and there is no signal to be given, and he has been waiting for a thing that does not exist.

On Sunday somebody at the front says the word community twice and he feels a small hot resistance he does not like in himself.

Citizenship was not put to a vote

Come and lean on the gate with me, because there is a sentence in Ephesians written to people who had exactly your feeling and were, in their case, genuinely being kept at the edge.

Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God.Ephesians 2:19

Read it as a legal statement, because that is what it is.

No more strangers. No more foreigners. Fellow citizens. Household.

That is not a description of how the room felt about them. It is a declaration of status, made by God, about people who at that moment were still being looked at sideways by a good number of the other believers in that city. The status did not wait for the room to catch up. It was true first, and the room caught up afterwards, and some of it never did.

Hear this at your own gate. You are not a guest, and it is the written word that settles it, not the street. Scripture says you are of the household, and the Holy Spirit is the one who made that true and sealed it, and no neighbor on that road was ever consulted about it and none of them has the power to revoke it.

Now let me name the thing you have been waiting for, because naming it will end it.

You have been waiting to be admitted. And the reason it has never happened is not that they have withheld it. It is that admission is not something a street does, nothing in the written word ever said it was, and the Holy Spirit has not been holding anything back from you. There is no gate on that road except the one your hand is on.

Streets do not choose people. That is the whole point of a street, and it is the whole idea underneath a parish: the boundary is drawn on the ground, not around the people who agree, so everyone who lives inside it is in it, and nobody had to be selected, and nobody can be de selected either.

They did not pick you. They did not pick each other. The man at number nine did not pick the woman two doors up. Not one person on that road is there because the others approved them, and that means the thing you have been waiting for was never given to anybody, including the ones who look most at home.

Hear this too, and let it land where the small hot resistance was. You are not on the outside of anything, and the written word says so in the plainest legal language it has. What is written calls you a fellow citizen, and the Spirit of God has been making you a dwelling place on that road for three years, and a citizen standing at his own gate waiting for permission is simply a man who has not read his own papers.

And now the practical turn, which is the good part.

If nobody hands out belonging, then belonging is not received, it is exercised. You do not get let in. You start behaving like what you already are.

Which is why the smallest possible action is the right one. Not a gesture that announces anything. A man who is a citizen of a street learns a name, puts a bin back, says something at a gate on a warm evening. That is not a bid for acceptance. That is what a resident does, and doing it is not how you become one.