The Far End Of The School Gate

Marcus gets there at 3:12, which is eight minutes before the bell, and he stands at the far corner where the fence turns and runs down along the bike rack under the sycamore.

Four years. Same corner.

There is a reason and it is not a dramatic one. Four years ago, in his first week of doing the school run, a woman with a stroller had asked him what he did, in the ordinary way people ask, and he had been laid off eleven days earlier and had not told anybody yet, and what came out of his mouth was a half sentence that stopped in the middle and then a sort of laugh. She was kind about it. That was somehow the worst part. She said something warm and turned back to her friend and Marcus stood there with his ears going hot, and the next day he came at 3:12 instead of 3:19 and stood down by the bike rack, and that was that. Four years of 3:12.

He has a system now. He looks at his phone for the first two minutes so it is clear he is occupied. Then he watches the sycamore, which drops those helicopter seeds in September and is genuinely interesting if you have decided to be interested in it. Then the bell goes and he watches the door, and Iris comes out with her coat half on and her lunch box swinging, and she runs the whole length of the fence to get to him, past every other parent, every day, and never once has she asked why he stands down here.

He knows what the group by the main gate looks like. Twelve or fourteen of them, coffee cups, the sound they make when somebody's joke lands. He does not resent them. He has thought about it enough to know that if he walked up there tomorrow they would move over and make room and be perfectly nice about it, and that this is somehow not the point.

This term there is a new one. A woman in a red anorak who came the first week of the new school year and stood in the middle of the fence, and then two days later stood a bit further along, and now stands about six feet from Marcus with her hands in her pockets, looking at nothing, exactly the way he does.

They have not spoken. On Tuesday she nodded at him and he nodded back and both of them looked away, and that had been so nearly a conversation that Marcus thought about it twice that evening.

Today she is there again, six feet along the chain link, and the sun is coming through the fence in long stripes across the sidewalk, and the bell has not gone yet.

She says, without turning her head, "Can I ask you something?"

The one who lights the lamp is the one who sets it down

Everybody quotes the first half of this and nobody reads the grammar.

Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.Matthew 5:15

Look at who is doing the verbs. Men light the candle. Men put it on the candlestick. The candle lights nothing, places nothing, and chooses nothing about where it ends up. The only thing the candle does in that entire sentence is give light, which is the one thing it cannot help doing, because it is lit.

This is not a small point. It is the whole difference between a fact and an assignment. If the lamp were responsible for getting itself onto the stand, then everything about your visibility would be your job, and standing at the far end of a fence would be a failure. But the sentence does not read that way, and it never has.

You are a lamp that was lit by somebody else and set down by somebody else, and neither of those was ever your job. Matthew 5:15 puts both verbs in another set of hands, and the Holy Spirit is what walks that sentence out of a book and up to a stretch of chain link fence in the afternoon.

And where the lamp gets put is not a stage. A candlestick in that world was a clay stand about a hand high, on a shelf, in a one room house. It was not elevation. It was just off the floor, out of the draft, where a lamp does what a lamp does. Nobody was watching the lamp. They were doing their evening by it.

You have light on you at that fence, and it was there while you were looking at your shoes. Psalm 139:12 says the darkness and the light are both alike to God, which means His seeing does not depend on anybody else's, and the Spirit is not waiting for a crowd to notice before He agrees with what is written.

A quiet corner is not a bushel

Now the bushel, because that word has been used against quiet people for a very long time.

A bushel was a measuring bowl. It was not a hiding place; it was a piece of kitchen equipment for measuring grain. Somebody who put a bowl over a lamp was not being secretive. They were doing something practical and slightly stupid, because a clay bowl over an oil lamp puts it out for want of air.

So notice what hiding actually means in that verse. It is not standing where you can breathe. It is not preferring the end of the fence to the middle of it. It is putting a measure over the light, which is a thing done by measuring, and there is more than one bowl in that cupboard. Some people get put under someone else's measure. Some people, having once stopped in the middle of a sentence with their ears going hot, pick up the bowl themselves.

You were never under a bushel. You were standing where you could breathe. Those are two entirely different things, and 1 Samuel 16:7 draws the line between them: the Lord looketh on the heart, not on the outward appearance, and the Spirit reads that over a man at 3:12 in the afternoon with his phone in his hand.

And I am not going to tell you to walk up to the main gate. That is not the message and it is not in the verse. There are people reading this who stay out of view for reasons they have never said out loud to anybody, and those reasons are not cowardice and they are not a spiritual problem. A quiet person is not an unfinished loud person.

This is yours, and it does not need an audience to be switched on. 2 Corinthians 4:7 settled where the treasure lives, in clay jars and not on display, and what the Spirit adds is that the jar in question is the one standing by the bike rack in a gray coat.