Four Years On The Same Crew

Four years on the same crew and I never had that man in my house.

We were on the same truck most mornings out of the yard at ten past six. I knew the sound of his cough. I knew he took two sugars and would not admit to the second one. I knew his back went in the wet and he would work through it and lie about it after.

Four winters. Same cab. Same radio station because he got there first.

And in four years I never once said, come up to the house on Sunday. Not once. I have said it to men I have known three weeks.

Now if you had asked me at the time, I would have given you a reason and I would have believed it. He would not want to. He would not be comfortable. He has his own people and I have mine. His wife would not know anybody. It is a long way out to us.

Every one of those reasons was true, and not one of them was the reason.

The reason was that somewhere behind my own eyes there was a line, and he was on the other side of it, and I had never once had to look at it because I had never once done the thing that would have made it show.

An invitation makes a line show. That is what an invitation is for.

I found out on a Tuesday in November when he ended up at our table anyway, because his van died in the lane and my wife saw him from the window and had him in before I got home from the yard.

Walked in my own kitchen and there he was with a plate.

Now put my truck down and go and look at your own week.

Who do you work beside all week and have never had in your house?

The word that had to be taken off him

There is a scene in the tenth chapter of Acts that I have never got over, and I will tell you plainly why.

Peter is up on a flat roof in the middle of the day and he is hungry, and God gives him a picture, and the picture is about food, and it is not about food at all.

Three times. Three refusals. Peter is a good man arguing with God about something he is certain of, and he is certain of it because everybody he has ever respected was certain of it too.

Then the men are at the gate and he goes with them to a house he would never have entered, and here is what comes out of his mouth when he gets there.

You are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with or visit a Gentile. But God has shown me that I should not call anyone impure or common.Acts 10:28

Now read it the way a man reads a note left under a wiper blade. You have been handed the same sentence Peter was handed, and it was the Holy Spirit who did the handing, and it lands in a yard exactly as well as it landed on a roof in Joppa.

Read the grammar of it, because it matters. God has shown me. Not I worked it out. Not I examined myself and repented of my attitude. It was taken off him. He did not put it down.

That is the good news in this for a man like me, and for you.

You are not being asked to manufacture a warmth you have not got. The word says God showed Peter, and it was the Holy Spirit who arranged the roof and the hunger and the men at the gate and the timing of all three, and He is just as capable of arranging a Tuesday in November. You are in His hands and you were before you noticed the line.

And here is the second thing, which is harder.

Peter's line was not hatred. Read the chapter. There is not one drop of malice in that man. It was a map, honestly held, never examined, and it took a vision to shift it because nothing less would have.

So do not go looking in your chest for cruelty and conclude you are fine because you cannot find any. That is not where it lives. It lives in the invitations you have not made, and you will never find it by feeling around. You find it by counting.

Count who has sat at your table this year.

You have a Helper for this, and He is not gentle about it in the way you might want, but He is never cruel. Scripture says the Spirit fell on that whole Gentile house while Peter was still talking, before the argument was settled and before anybody had changed their theology, because God does not wait for a man to finish reasoning before He pours out.

But you are not short of anything for this. The word says God showed Peter, and the showing was done to him rather than worked up by him, and the Holy Spirit who arranged a roof and a hunger and three men at a gate is the same One who has kept that man in your cab for four winters.