The Man On The Other Side Of The Fence

Dave. That is what he has got. Nine years and a name.

They cut the grass at the same time most weeks, which is not coordinated and has simply happened, the way these things do. Saturday morning, ten-ish. Two mowers going, forty feet apart. Then the nod, and the thing about the weather, and once a year the thing about the hedge.

He knows Dave has a daughter because he has seen a car. He knows Dave was off work for a stretch two winters ago because the grass got long and then somebody else cut it. He does not know what he does, or did. He does not know whether there is a wife or was one. He has never been inside that house and Dave has never been inside his.

Nine years. Something like four hundred Saturdays. Four hundred nods.

And what he would tell you, if you asked him, is that Dave is a private man and that he is respecting that.

Which might be true. It is also exactly what he would say if the actual situation were that neither man has ever once been the first to say a real sentence, and both have been waiting nine years for the other one to go first, in the polite standoff that two decent people can maintain indefinitely.

He is a Christian. Dave, as far as he knows, is not, and he does not actually know that either.

And every so often, pushing the mower up the long side, he thinks: I am going to say something one of these weeks. And then the mower turns at the end and he does not.

The bounds were appointed

Paul is speaking in Athens and he says something about geography that most people read as poetry and is not poetry at all.

And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.Acts 17:26

Take that on your own lawn. You were put on that street and the fence line is not a coincidence. The word says He determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept you both there nine years.

The bounds of their habitation. Determined. Appointed.

Where a person lives, and when, is not treated in that sentence as an accident of the housing market. Paul says it plainly and then, in the next breath, he says what it is for: that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after Him and find Him.

Placement is purposeful. That is the claim.

So take this on your own lawn, and know it is not my sentiment, it is what is written: you were put there, and the fence line is not random. His word says He determined the times before appointed and the bounds of their habitation, and it is the Holy Spirit who has had you four feet from that man on four hundred Saturday mornings.

You have thought of Dave as a neighbor you happen to have. Scripture describes him as a neighbor you were given.

There was a preacher in England in the seventeen hundreds who spent fifty years going to where people already were. Fields, market squares, pit heads at five in the morning, prisons at any hour they would open a gate.

Here is the part that gets forgotten because it is unglamorous. Most of the actual work of that movement was not done by him in front of thousands. It was done by ordinary people in the houses either side of their own.

They visited. They sat with the sick on their own street. They took food four doors down. The whole structure was built on the assumption that the person nearest you is the assignment, and that a movement is not a crowd, it is a very large number of people who crossed a small distance.

He never spoke against the gathered church. He loved it and stayed in it. He simply put the work back where the people were, which was mostly forty feet away over a fence.