You Know Which Gate Sticks

The route runs in an order that has never been written down anywhere, and it is exact.

First house is ready twelve minutes early and is standing at the front window with her coat on, watching for the van, and has been for a quarter of an hour. Second house needs the extra two minutes and always will, and the two minutes are built into the timings, and nobody has ever mentioned it. Third house shouts I'm not ready through the door and is completely ready, coat, bag, keys, everything, and has been ready since eight.

You know which gate sticks. You lift it on the hinge with your knee and it swings, and anybody else has to be told, and they still get it wrong the first two times. You know whose bag goes on the seat and not the floor. You know who has to be in front because of the corner by the roundabout. You know which stick goes in the well and which one comes up on the lap. You know the tire pressures, the one indicator that has been temperamental for two years, and precisely how long it takes to get everybody down the step and inside with dignity, which is the part nobody times and the part that actually takes the time.

You have never heard an opening song.

Not in years. Not properly. You come in through the side, somewhere in the middle of the notices, and you have therefore heard the second half of every announcement made in that building for a decade. You could give an authoritative account of the parking arrangements. You could not tell anybody what the current series is called.

And at the end you are up and moving before the last prayer, because it all has to happen in reverse, and there are people standing waiting at a door who should not be standing waiting at a door. So you have not heard a closing blessing either.

Now, none of that is a complaint, and I want to be careful with it, because it is genuinely not. Nobody made you do this. You would do it again tomorrow and you know you would, and there is real gladness in that van on the way over, and the conversation between the second and third house is one of the best fifteen minutes of anybody's week.

But there is a small thing underneath that comes up sometimes on the way home, in an empty van, and it does not have a good name. Something like: I have been beside that room for years rather than in it. And underneath that, quieter and much harder to say, a second one: if I stopped doing this, I am not entirely sure what I would be.

The Spirit Once Sent a Man to a Vehicle

Let me put a story in front of you that nobody ever preaches at drivers, which is strange, because it happens almost entirely on wheels.

There is a man in Samaria in the middle of the best week of his ministry. A whole city is paying attention. There is joy in that place, the text says so, and by any measure a man would be mad to leave.

And an angel sends him south, to a desert road, on his own. He goes. And then there is a chariot on that road with one man in it, and this happens:

Then the Spirit said unto Philip, Go near, and join thyself to this chariot.Acts 8:29

He runs alongside a moving vehicle. He gets invited up. And the entire thing, the conversation, the passage, the questions, the preaching of Jesus, all of it, takes place in a seat next to a driver, on a road, going somewhere. Not in the meeting. Not in the city where the crowds were. In a vehicle, mid journey, with the wheels turning.

You have been in the room the whole time, and the room has simply been moving. Acts 8:29 has the Holy Spirit pulling a man out of a packed venue and posting him to a vehicle, which He would hardly do if a vehicle were the second best place to be. He does not regard a seat by a driver as an anteroom to the real thing.

And it is a habit with Him, not an exception. Two men walk to a village and a stranger falls in with them and opens the whole of Scripture on the way, and they only recognize Him later. A man on the way to Damascus is met on the road. The Lord is constantly, almost preferentially, doing His work on journeys.

You were never on the outside of anything. The written word says He is not far from every one of us, and Acts 17:27 leaves no room for a version of Him that is concentrated at the front of a hall and thinner in a car park, and the Holy Spirit fills a moving van as completely as He fills a platform. The distance you have been imagining between that van and that room does not exist. It never did.

Nobody Is Rationing the First Fifteen Minutes

Now let me say something plainly, because this is where an article like this usually goes wrong and I am not going to let it.

I am not asking you for anything. Not one extra thing. If you finish this and conclude you should also be doing the Thursday, put it down and go and have your lunch. This is not a recruitment piece dressed as encouragement, and the last thing a faithful person needs is another quiet suggestion that they could be doing more.

Because here is the thing that has to be said before anything else. If you stopped tomorrow, permanently, and somebody else took that route, you would be precisely as much His as you are this morning. Not slightly less. Not a bit further from the middle of things. The same.

You have a standing that no rota gave you and no rota can take back. Scripture says we are accepted in the beloved, and Ephesians 1:6 fixes that acceptance in Christ rather than in anything a person has been useful for, and the Holy Spirit is the one who bears witness with a man's spirit that he belongs to God. That was settled before you ever held a set of keys.

And then, once that is settled and only once it is settled, this:

God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labour of love, which ye have shewed toward his name.Hebrews 6:10

Not unrighteous to forget. That is an odd phrase and it is worth slowing down on. It says that overlooking the work would be an injustice, and God will not commit one. Nobody in that building is keeping the record of which gate sticks. Somebody is.

You are seen in the exact place where nobody is looking, and that has been the arrangement from the start. Scripture says thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly, and Matthew 6:4 makes the unseen place the ordinary location of His attention rather than an unfortunate accident, and the Holy Spirit has been in that van on every single run. The first fifteen minutes were never the part where He shows up.

One more thing, and this is a permission and not a duty. It is entirely allowed to ask somebody to take the route once a quarter so that you can walk in at the beginning and sit down and hear an opening song. That is not letting anybody down. A man who has driven for years is allowed to be a passenger, and nothing about his standing moves either way when he does.