The Fence Next Door

Every morning at ten to six Joaquin walks to the corner for the bus, and every morning the gate at number eleven is hanging off its top hinge with a brick holding it half shut.

He has been walking past it since November. He knows the sound it makes when the wind gets it, which is a slow scrape and then a knock, and he can hear it from his own kitchen. He knows the woman who lives there is elderly and lives alone. He knows there is an oil can and a bag of screws in a crate in his hallway, because he has carried that crate through three addresses.

He is not a hard man. He is the opposite. He would tell you, and mean it, that he has been waiting nine months for God to show him what he is for.

He came out of something. That is not this message's business, so let it stand as a fact: he came out, and he is out, and he is free, and he has been free for a while now. And he has spent this whole free year with a hunger in him the size of a house, praying more or less one prayer, which is send me. Use me. Tell me what all this was for.

He has been to the meetings. He has asked three people he respects to pray about it with him. He has been faithful in it and not a single word of it has been wasted, whatever the next part of this message might make him think.

And every morning at ten to six, the gate scrapes and knocks in the wind.

The reason he does not see it is not that he is selfish. It is that a broken gate does not look like an answer. He is watching the sky. He is waiting for something with weight in it, a door opening somewhere, a voice, a piece of news, a call that arrives all at once and settles the whole question. And a hinge with a brick under it does not register as any of that, so his eyes go over it every morning the way they go over the road markings.

Then one Tuesday he is early for the bus by four minutes, and he stops. And instead of looking at the gate, he looks at it properly. At the way the screws have pulled out of soft wood. At the brick, which somebody old had to carry there and set down. At the path behind it, and how somebody with a bad hip is getting through that gap twice a day.

And he thinks, entirely without meaning to: I could fix that in twenty minutes.

You are the one at the corner.

I am not going to tell you the waiting has been a mistake, because it has not been. The hunger to be used is a good hunger and it came from God, and nine months of asking Him for it is not nine months lost. But I want to stand next to you at that corner for a minute and look at what has been at the end of your street the whole time.

Everything the man used was already on him

Let me name the weight first, because it is a strange one and it does not sound like a weight at all.

It is not laziness and it is not that you love God less than the people you have watched get sent somewhere. It is that you have been given an enormous freedom and you cannot find the shape of it, and the longer that goes on the more you start to suspect something about yourself. That whatever the big thing is, it was handed out while you were still inside. That you got out in time to be free and too late to be useful.

Let me put the ground down before I say a word over you. Luke 10 is what this stands on, and the Holy Spirit is the one who reads a road story onto an actual street with an actual gate on it. You are already carrying what the next thing needs, and you were never sent out empty.

You know the story. A man is left half dead on the road down to Jericho, two religious men go past on the other side, and a Samaritan stops. Everybody remembers that he stopped. Almost nobody looks at the next verse, which is where the whole thing happens.

He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him.Luke 10:34

Read what he used. Oil. Wine. His own animal. An inn that was already on the road he was already traveling. There is no miracle in that verse. Nothing arrives from heaven. Every single item is standard equipment for a man on a journey in that country: the oil and the wine were what you carried for your own scrapes and your own supper, and the animal was how you got to work.

Nothing was issued to him for the occasion. He was not called and then equipped. He was equipped, in the ordinary way, years before, and then he came round a bend and the call was lying in the road. You have oil and wine in your own hallway, and it has been standard equipment the whole time you were praying for a shipment. That is not my clever reading, it is what Luke 10 actually lists, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my enthusiasm who puts an old road into a street with a bus stop on the corner.

Prepared beforehand, which is the opposite of missed

Now here is the part that takes the accusation off the nine months, because I am not going to leave it standing.

Paul writes that we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them (Ephesians 2:10). Prepared beforehand. Sit with that phrase for a second, because it is doing something for you that you have not let it do.

If the works were prepared beforehand, then they are not a train you missed. They were laid down along a road, by God, in advance, and a thing laid down in advance is still there when you arrive at it. That is what beforehand means. The gate did not come off its hinge because you were slow. It came off in November and it has been waiting, and the waiting was never a penalty. You were not passed over while you were praying, and the work was not reassigned to somebody quicker, and that is God's own word in Ephesians 2, with His Spirit refusing to keep it back until you feel more qualified.

And notice what this does to the size question, because size is the whole problem here. You have been sorting the possibilities by weight, looking for something heavy enough to be the answer, and Scripture keeps handing out assignments with no weight in them at all. Oil on a wound. A cup of cold water. A gate. The Spirit does not hold the ordinary in lower regard than the dramatic, and the word never once sorted the works by how they would look from the corner. This is yours, at the end of your own street, in the next twenty minutes, and it is written in Luke 10, with the Holy Spirit standing at the gate beside you.

One plain thing before we go on, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If the months of waiting have stopped being hunger and turned into something heavier, if the question of what you are for has gone somewhere dark, tell one human being today, and if there is any danger in it for you, reach the crisis line where you live and let a real voice stay with you. Reaching for that is not a detour from your calling; it is one of the ordinary things a free man does.