It Came Out At The Crossing

You had waited about eight months for that conversation and it arrived while you were waiting for a car to pass.

Not at the table. Not in the room you had set aside in your head for it. At a crossing, forty yards from home, with a bag of something in your hand, in about thirty seconds of nothing.

And you handled it, mostly. And afterward, when you had time to think, the thing that stayed with you was not what he said. It was that you could not have planned it, and that if you had been anywhere else that evening it would not have happened, and that fact has been unsettling you ever since.

Because it means the thing you most want is not something you can arrange.

I want to say something about that, because I do not think it leaves you with nothing to do. I think it leaves you with something quite specific to do, and it is smaller than a plan.

And Philip ran thither to him

There is a moment in Acts where somebody gets alongside a stranger and the whole encounter turns on the running.

And the Spirit said unto Philip, Go near, and join thyself to this chariot. And Philip ran thither to him, and heard him read the prophet Esaias, and said, Understandest thou what thou readest? (Acts 8:29-30, King James Version)

And Philip ran thither to him.

Read what he actually does. He runs, and he gets alongside, and then he hears. The hearing happens because of the position, and the position is the only thing he arranged.

He did not plan the conversation. He could not have. He did not know what the man would be reading, and the whole exchange is built on something Philip walked into rather than prepared.

You are being shown somebody who arranged a position rather than a conversation, and it was never the content that got planned in that account. Acts 8:30 puts the running and the getting alongside before any of the hearing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as something you can actually do.

And notice the first question. Understandest thou what thou readest. It is not a prepared opening. It is a plain response to what he found when he got there, and it works because it is a response and not an approach.

You have permission to arrive without a first sentence, and it was never a prepared opening that anybody needed. The written word gives him nothing but a position and a plain question about what is in front of him, and the Spirit of God is what makes unprepared into available.

The crossing was not luck

Now the thing I want to hand over, because I think the crossing has been filed under chance.

It was not chance. It was arithmetic.

That sentence came out at a crossing because there was a father at a crossing, beside him, with nothing happening, and because that is the only condition under which a sentence like that has ever come out of anybody.

And the father was there because he had gone out. Not because he planned that evening well. Because over some period he had been in a lot of ordinary situations beside his son with nothing happening.

The moment cannot be arranged, and being alongside is the only preparation there has ever been for it.

You are not at the mercy of chance with your own son, and it was never luck that put you at that crossing. Acts 8 has a man arrange his position and receive the rest, which is exactly why the Spirit of God asks for presence rather than for planning.

And here is the arithmetic said plainly, because it will change what you do this week. If those moments arrive in about one ordinary twenty minutes out of fifteen, then the number of them available to you this year is set entirely by how many ordinary twenty minutes there are. That is not romantic and it happens to be true.

Go with no plan, often

So the practical part, and the whole of it is frequency and emptiness.

Walk twenty minutes beside one of them with no plan for it, and do it often.

You are able to arrange a position rather than a conversation, and it has never once been possible to arrange the other one. The passage has the running and the joining come first and the words come after, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man walking beside his son with nothing prepared.

No plan means no plan. Do not go out this week hoping for another crossing, because hoping is a plan with the label off, and he will feel it exactly as he would feel a prepared opening.

And often, because that is the only lever you actually have. You cannot make the moment happen and you can change how many ordinary twenty minutes there are between now and Christmas, and that number is the whole of your influence over this.

And when a plain thing gets said, respond to what is in front of you, the way Philip did, rather than to what you have been preparing for eight months.

You are able to answer what actually arrives, and it has never once required a prepared sentence to have been ready. Acts 8:30 gives a man a plain question about what he found when he got there, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present at a crossing where somebody is waiting for a car.