The School Gate At Three Fifteen

Nine of them, most days, in roughly the same spot by the railing.

She knows what two of them do for a living, whose marriage is bad, which one is on her third round of treatment and which two have fallen out over a birthday party. She knows the name of every child and most of the dogs.

Four years of standing there, five days a week, term time, in every kind of weather. That is something like seven hundred afternoons.

And she has never once said anything true.

She wants to be careful about that sentence because it sounds harsher than she means it. She is not a liar. She is warm and people like her and she remembers things. But she has never said a single sentence at that railing that came out of the actual center of her life, and the actual center of her life is that she belongs to Jesus and it changes the whole shape of her week.

She talks about the weather, and the parking, and the homework, and whether the trip is worth the money.

Here is the thing that has been sitting on her, and she would not put it this way, but it is what it is. She thinks that saying something would mean starting something. A conversation with a structure. Words she does not have and a face she would have to watch while she said them.

So she stands there with her hands in her pockets and she is kind to everybody and she goes home, seven hundred times, and every so often on the walk back she feels the small specific sadness of a person who has not been dishonest and has not been herself either.

Ready, not rehearsed

Peter writes the sentence everybody thinks is about apologetics, and it is, and it is also about a posture that most people skip straight past.

But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.1 Peter 3:15

Take that at the railing tomorrow. You have real hope in you already and no script is outstanding. The word says be ready always to give an answer for the hope that is in you, and it is the Holy Spirit who put it there and arranges who asks.

Read the mechanics of it. There is a hope in you. Somebody asks. You give an answer, gently.

Nobody in that verse starts anything. Nobody delivers anything. The whole thing runs on the assumption that a person with real hope in them will eventually be visible enough that somebody says: why are you like that.

Which means the job is not to open a conversation. It is to be a person who can be asked.

So hear this at that railing, and know it is not my encouragement, it is what is written: the hope is already in you, right now, and it does not require a script to be real. His word says be ready always to give an answer for the hope that is in you, and it is the Holy Spirit who put the hope there and who does the arranging of who asks and when.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who was met by God at a meeting he did not want to attend, and who then did a thing that got him thrown out of a great many buildings. He went outside.

Not because the buildings were bad. He loved the church he was ordained in and never left it. It was simply that the people he wanted to reach were not in them, and were never going to be, and so he stood in fields and at pit heads and in market squares and talked to whoever was there.

He preached at five in the morning at coal mines because that is when a shift came up. He preached in the churchyard when they would not give him the pulpit. He went to where people already were, at the hour they were already there, in the clothes they were already wearing.

That is the whole invention, and it is not a technique. There is no quota in it and no script. He simply stopped requiring that people come to him first.

Your gate is a field. Three fifteen is five in the morning at the pit head. You are already standing in the place, at the hour, with the people, five days a week, and you have been waiting for a different venue to be provided.