A Hundred People And None Of Them

Four hundred and eleven contacts. He counted them on a Tuesday night, which is not a thing a well-adjusted man does at eleven o'clock, and he knows that, and he did it anyway.

He went through them properly. Not skimming. He gave each one about a second and a half and asked himself the same question, which was: could I say this to you.

Four hundred and eleven no.

Some of them were obviously no. Suppliers. A plumber. Three people whose surnames he could not have told you. A woman from a course in 2019.

But there were about forty who were not obviously no, and those are the ones that took him until nearly one in the morning.

His brother, who he loves and speaks to weekly and who would be baffled. Two men from the five-a-side, both of whom he would trust with his children and neither of whom he has ever had a serious conversation with in nine years. A man from work called Prakash who he suspects would understand it entirely, and who he has never once seen outside the building. A woman who was at that thing four years ago, who said something in a parking lot afterwards that he has never forgotten and has also never mentioned to her.

He is fifty.

He is not lonely in the ordinary sense. He has a full week. People ring him. He was at three barbecues last summer and organized one of them.

And he has been carrying a question for about two years that requires a person, and he went through four hundred and eleven names at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday looking for one, and did not find one, and put the phone face down on the arm of the chair and sat there for a while.

The list is measuring the wrong thing

I want to start with what you actually did on that Tuesday, because I think you have filed it as something pathetic and it was not.

You audited four hundred and eleven relationships against one honest question and you did it seriously, one and a half seconds each, for two hours.

Most men never ask that question once in their lives. You asked it four hundred and eleven times in an evening, and the answer that came back was not a comfortable one, and you did not flinch away from it or go to bed at the forties.

That is not pathetic. That is a rare piece of self-knowledge, arrived at properly, and it cost you a night.

But the list was measuring the wrong thing, and I want to show you what.

A contacts list records people you have transacted with. It is a record of overlap: work, football, a course in 2019, a plumber. It is not a record of closeness and it was never designed to be, and running an intimacy audit against it is like weighing something on a tape measure.

The forty are the interesting ones and I will come back to them.

First, here is what is true about your actual position.

A man that hath friends must shew himself friendly: and there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.Proverbs 18:24

That second half is the part everybody quotes and the first half is the part that does the work.

A man that hath friends must shew himself friendly. It is not a scolding. It is a statement of mechanism: closeness is produced by somebody going first, and it does not happen by accumulation, and four hundred and eleven overlaps do not add up to one of it.

And then the proverb turns and says there is a friend closer than a brother, which is a startling claim in a culture built on blood, and it is the sentence Christians have always read as pointing past every human friendship to one particular one.

You have a friend who sticks closer than a brother, tonight, with the phone face down on the arm of the chair, and that is not encouragement, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing on the two hours rather than on a proverb you have heard on a card.

Now let me go back to the forty.

Your brother, who would be baffled. The two from the five-a-side you would trust with your children. Prakash, who you suspect would understand it entirely. The woman from four years ago who said something in a parking lot.

Read that list again and notice something: you have information about four of them that could only come from paying attention. You know Prakash would understand. You know those two men are trustworthy. You remember a sentence from a parking lot four years ago.

You have not been failing to notice people. You have been failing to go first. Scripture puts it in exactly those terms, and the Spirit of God is the one who has kept you at three barbecues and on a five-a-side pitch for nine years, and who has kept a sentence from a parking lot alive in you for four.

I want to say the practical thing and then stop, because I know one thing about your life and you know the rest.

The question is not who is close enough. You answered that four hundred and eleven times and the answer is nobody yet, and that answer is honest and it is also about the past.

The question is who could be asked. Which is a completely different question and it has, on your own account, at least four answers on it.

You are not without company. The word says there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother, and the Spirit is the seal on it, and the reason nobody on that list is close enough is not that you are unlovable. It is that closeness runs on somebody going first, and for fifty years the first mover has always been somebody else.

You have a friend who sticks closer than a brother, tonight, with the phone face down on the arm of the chair. Scripture said that in a culture built on blood so that nobody could miss what it meant, and the Holy Spirit has kept a parking lot sentence alive in you for four years.