Forty Miles From Anything

Forty-one, if you go the way the road actually goes. He has driven it. Once, on a Sunday, four years ago, without telling anybody, and he turned round at the edge of the town and drove back.

That is the whole story of that Sunday and he has never repeated it.

Out here there is a road, and there is the store at the junction which is also the post office and which sells one kind of bread, and there is a building with a cross on it that has not been open since before he moved here and now has a bird's nest in the porch.

He is forty-six. He has been here eleven years and he is not lonely in the way people from towns imagine. He has neighbors. There is a man called Roy who is nine miles away and who would come at two in the morning with a chain and a truck if it came to that, and it has, twice.

But there is nobody he could ask about this.

That is not a complaint about Roy. Roy is the best man in that county and he does not have a religious bone in his body and would be genuinely embarrassed and would try to be helpful and it would be awful for both of them.

He came to it on his own, out here, over about two years, mostly at first light on a ridge with a flask, and he has never been in a room with other people while it was happening. He has read a great deal. He listens to things while he works.

And what he has never been able to arrange, and has thought about at least once a week for four years, is the thing that as far as he can tell requires other people.

The forty-one miles is not really the problem. He would drive four hundred. The problem is that at the end of the forty-one miles is a town where he does not know one single person's name.

There is one story like yours

I want to tell you what is in the Bible about a man on an empty road, and then I want to be very careful about what I do and do not do with it, and I will tell you in advance what I am not going to do so you are not braced for it.

There is exactly one account of this kind of thing happening on a road with essentially no institution anywhere near it.

And as they went on their way, they came unto a certain water: and the eunuch said, See, here is water; what doth hinder me to be baptized?Acts 8:36

The setting matters. That is a desert road. There is no building, no congregation, no arrangement, and no plan: two men in a chariot, one of whom had been sent to that road by God without being told why, and one of whom was going home from a long journey reading a scroll he did not understand.

The whole company was a stranger who had been on that road for about an hour.

Now here is what I am not going to do, and I want to be plain about it because you are practical and you would be ahead of me otherwise.

I am not going to turn that verse into an instruction. Not one word of this page tells you where or how or in what water, and I am not going to hand a resourceful man on his own on a ridge a story about a roadside pool and leave the rest to him. There is water in this county that has drowned people who knew it better than you do, and a page cannot see what you are looking at, and I will not be the thing that put an idea in a competent man's head at first light on his own.

So let me take the useful part of that verse instead, which is not the water.

It is the man in the chariot.

You are somebody God sends people to, and that is what that account is actually about, and it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing on the eleven years rather than on a passage you have almost certainly listened to while working.

Philip was told to go to that road and was not told why. He did not know there was a man on it. He did not know the man had a scroll. The entire arrangement was made by God and neither participant knew the shape of it until they were in it.

And notice how much of the traditional apparatus is missing. No congregation. No building. No schedule. No committee. You are not required to produce the apparatus, because that account has none of it in it. The written word records the whole afternoon without one institution in it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who sent the only other man on that road.

Now let me say the practical thing, and it is one sentence long, and then I am going to stop.

Find one person.

That is all, and I mean it as warmly as it can be meant. Not a congregation, not a building, not the arrangement you have been trying to construct at forty-one miles for four years. One person who could be asked, and who might be forty-one miles away in a town where you do not know a name, and who is a great deal easier to find than a whole community is.

I am stopping there deliberately. I do not know your county and I do not know that town and anybody at this distance who tells you where to go is guessing with your life.

You are not disqualified by geography. Scripture puts the whole of that story on an empty road between two men who had never met, and the Spirit of God is the one who arranged it, and He has been with you at first light on a ridge with a flask for four years.

You are somebody God sends people to, which is what that account on the desert road is actually about. Scripture puts the whole of it between two men who had never met, with no building anywhere in it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who sent Philip without telling him why.