The Family Two Doors Down

The bread came out of the oven at half past five, the way it had every evening on that landing for eleven years.

Two doors. Four meters of concrete between them. On one side a man who had lived in that building since he was newly married, and on the other side a family who had arrived four winters ago with three suitcases and a grandmother.

He knew the sound of their kettle. He knew which child cried at night. He knew the smell of what they cooked on a Friday, and he could have told you the hour their eldest came home from work. He knew everything about them that a wall can teach you and nothing at all that a person can.

And here is the part that would embarrass him if you said it out loud: in four winters he had never learned one word of their language. Not hello. Not thank you. Not the word for bread, which was sitting warm in his own hands.

He was not a cruel man. He had never once said anything unkind about them. He simply had a street in his head that ran a different way from the street under his feet, and on his street those four meters were a border.

Then one evening the grandmother was on the landing with a covered dish and no free hand for the door, and he opened it for her, and she said something he did not understand, and he said something she did not understand, and they both laughed.

Four meters. Eleven years. One door held open.

Now, before you go any further, let me ask you the thing this whole message is about.

Who is two doors down from you?

Heaven solved the language problem before anybody asked it to

On the day the Church was born, the very first thing the Holy Spirit did in public was not a healing and not a sermon.

It was a translation.

Parthians, Medes and Elamites; residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene; visitors from Rome, both Jews and converts to Judaism; Cretans and Arabs. We hear them declaring the wonders of God in our own tongues.Acts 2:9 to 11

Read that list slowly, because Luke did not have to write it. He could have said people from many nations and moved on. He wrote out fifteen names instead, he put Arabs at the end of it, and he did it because the list is the miracle.

The first public act of the Spirit poured out was to make the far ones hear in the language of home.

So understand what you are standing in. You are not a man who happens to live near strangers. You are a person the Holy Spirit has already carried across a border once, because Acts 2 says the wonders of God were spoken into your own tongue before you ever went looking for them, and God has never once crossed a distance in one direction only.

That is the whole ache of this house. Something fell on a room in Los Angeles in 1906 and the thing the newspapers could not get over was not the noise. It was who was sitting on the plank next to whom. Nobody planned it. It simply became impossible to keep the seating chart of that city inside that room.

And a seating chart is what you have. Not a hatred. A chart. It was never written anywhere, everybody follows it, and the Holy Spirit never once signed it.

Here is what I want to say gently, because this house honors the fire and never prosecutes the person. You are not being accused of anything tonight. You have not done a wicked thing by living quietly on your own side of a landing. What you have done is stop noticing, which is a much more ordinary thing and a much easier one to put down.

And you are already carrying what it takes to put it down. The word says the Spirit was poured out on all people, and if He is in you then the crossing is not a virtue you have to manufacture. It is a current already running toward the far ones, and you have the Helper. You do not have to generate the willingness. You have to stop damming it.

That is why the promise is worded the way it is. God did not say He would help you build a bridge. He said He would fall on everybody, which means the bridge was His idea and the Holy Spirit is standing on both ends of it already.