Ask One Person To Come With You

The boot of the car is open, it is twenty past nine on a Tuesday, and there are eleven bags in it.

She knows the route by heart. Number 4 first because he is up early. Then the flats, where the lift is out again and it is three floors, twice, because you cannot carry it all in one go. Then the road with the long gardens. Then the last two, which are the ones where she stays a bit and has a cup of tea and hears about the hip.

Two years. Every Tuesday, apart from Christmas.

Nobody asked her to start it. She noticed a gap, she filled it, and then it was hers, the way these things become yours. There is no rota with her name on it and no meeting where it is discussed. There is a boot, and eleven bags, and a woman in her fifties doing three flights of stairs twice with the lift out.

If you asked her whether she needs help she would say no, honestly and immediately, and she would mean it. She has an answer ready and the answer is that it is easier on her own, and there is a version of that which is completely true, because it is quicker and she knows the route and explaining it to somebody would take longer than doing it.

Here is the thing she has not noticed in two years, and it is not about the bags.

She has never once been asked how the round is going by anybody who has actually seen it.

There is nobody alive who knows what the stairs at the flats are like on a wet Tuesday, or that the man at number 4 has started repeating himself, or that she sat in the car for ten minutes last week after the last house without turning the key. All of that lives in one person. It goes in and it does not come out, because there is nobody it could come out to who would know what she was talking about.

That is not martyrdom and she is not complaining. She would be genuinely baffled by this paragraph.

It is just that the work has a shape, and the shape is wrong, and nobody has ever mentioned it to her because from the outside it looks like faithfulness. Which it is. It is faithfulness in the wrong shape, and the wrong shape is quietly costing her something she cannot see because she has never had it.

He never sent one

There is a line in Mark that goes past in about four seconds when you read the chapter, and it is one of the most practical things in the Gospels.

And He called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority.Mark 6, verse 7

Hear this in the car before the Tuesday round. You are not weak for asking, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture has Him send them out by two and two before any of them had done anything, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept you going out on your own faithfully for two years.

Two by two. Not twelve towns each. Six pairs.

Now think about the arithmetic of that, because Jesus was not sentimental about resources and He was not short of urgency. He could have covered twice the ground. Twelve men going twelve directions reaches twelve villages instead of six, and there is no shortage of villages, and time is short.

He halved His own coverage on purpose.

Whatever the pairing is doing, He counted it as worth more than double the ground. Not a nice extra when staffing allowed. Not a suggestion for the nervous ones. The pattern, from the start, deliberately, at the cost of half the reach.

And look at what He hands them in the same breath. He gave them authority. That is not given to a lone hero and it is not given to a committee. It is given to a pair, walking out of the village together, and when it comes to a house they are two people standing at a door rather than one person standing at a door, which is a different thing entirely for the person opening it.

Then look at what the first church actually did with all this. No buildings, no budget, no staff. They met in houses. They shared what they had. Things were carried between people constantly, hand to hand, and nobody in Acts is ever doing anything on their own for very long, because the whole of it is house to house, which is a phrase about two feet and a doorway and somebody with you.

So the thing you have been doing alone for two years was never designed to be done alone. And that is not a rebuke. Nobody told you. You saw a gap and you filled it, which is exactly what a person who loves God does, and the shape of it was never explained to anybody because everybody assumed everybody knew.

Hear this too, and let it land on the passenger seat. You have not been doing it wrong, and Scripture is what says so. What is written puts the pairing in the sending itself rather than in anybody's weakness, and the Spirit of God has been in every one of those solo Tuesdays with you.