What You Both Said About The Child

The two houses share one driveway and one gatepost, and for ten years that gatepost had been a border.

It started over a question. Not a small one, and not a stupid one either, and this message is not going to name which question it was, partly because it is none of my business and partly because you already know which one is yours. The two men held opposite ends of it. Each of them had read. Each of them could have given you forty minutes on it without notes.

There had been a letter. There had been a thread under a post that went on for four days and that both of them, if pressed, would admit they had refreshed at traffic lights. There had been an exchange at a school fundraiser beside the raffle table that neither of them ever mentioned again and neither of them ever forgot. After that there had been the nodding years, where you lift a hand from the car and never stop the engine.

Then a Tuesday in March, twenty to midnight.

The granddaughter was staying over next door. She was four. She had gone down with a temperature that afternoon and by half eleven she was not right, and by twenty to midnight she was not breathing properly, and her grandfather did the correct thing and called for an ambulance and then stood in the doorway with the phone still in his hand while his wife stayed with the girl.

The lights woke the other house. He came out in a coat over pajama trousers because that is what people do, and he stood at the end of his own drive, and neither man said anything at all while the paramedics went in.

Then the stretcher came out, small, and the doors shut, and the blue light started up and swung across the wet tarmac and both gate pillars and the hedge.

And both men said it. At the same second, out loud, without arranging it, from either side of the gatepost.

Jesus. Jesus, please.

They heard each other. That is the part.

Ten years of position, letter, thread, raffle table, nodding. And when the floor went out from under a four year old, both of them reached, in the dark, in the rain, for the same Name, and there was not a hair's breadth between the two sentences.

The girl was all right, as it turned out, and I am not going to build anything on that, because it does not always go that way and I will not lay a promise on you that God did not make.

But there is something you are meant to see in the driveway itself, before the outcome, while the blue light is still going round.

The verse that was spoken across a disagreement

Acts 4 is not a room where everybody agrees. It is a hearing. A man who could not walk has been healed at a gate, the whole city knows it, and two fishermen are standing in front of the most learned council in the country being asked by what power or by what name they did this.

Peter answers. And people quote his answer as though it were said among friends, when it was said in a room where nearly nobody in it was on his side.

Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.Acts 4:12

Notice what he does and does not do. He does not say there is no other argument. He does not say there is no other question worth having. He says there is no other Name. The thing at the center is a Person, and the Person has a Name, and that Name was what came out of two men on a wet driveway who had not agreed about anything in a decade.

This is yours right now, tonight, whatever the last ten years have looked like: you are held in the same Name as people you have written off, and I am not the one deciding that. Acts 4:12 puts a Name and not a position at the center of the whole thing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put that Name in your mouth at twenty to midnight before you had time to check whether it was allowed.

Now let me be careful, because there is a cheap version of this and it does real damage. The cheap version says the differences do not matter. That is not what happened on that driveway and it is not what I am saying to you. Neither of those men changed his mind that night, or since. Each still thinks the other is wrong, and each still has his reasons, and both of them have read more than most people ever will.

If your question mattered enough to cost you ten years, it mattered. I will not tell you it was nothing. Telling a person their conviction is unimportant is its own kind of verdict, and this is not a place where verdicts get handed out.

What you saw in the driveway is not that the argument was silly. It is that it was not the floor. Underneath the argument there was a floor, and both men were standing on it, and neither of them knew that until the night the floor was the only thing holding either of them up.

You have not been out here on your own. That is not a sentiment, it is a fact about the ground you are standing on: what is written in Acts 4:12 gives one Name for the whole of it, and His Spirit has kept that Name alive in mouths on both sides of your particular fence for as long as the fence has been up.

There is a specific loneliness in a long disagreement, and it is not really about the argument. It is the slow conviction that everybody who could have stood beside you is on the other side of something, and that you are the last one holding a position in an empty room. That conviction is a liar and it has had a long run.

You were given a household, not a faction. What is promised is that He is not ashamed to call His people brethren, and the same Spirit who prays in you when you have no words is praying in the man over the gatepost, and He has not been running two separate operations.