Thirty Years In Four Streets

Tuesday is tins.

The delivery comes Monday afternoon and sits in the back in its cardboard trays overnight, and on Tuesday morning Rita comes in at ten to seven, puts the lights on in the order she has put them on for thirty years, and starts moving tomatoes and beans and sweet corn onto the middle shelf, front facing, labels straight, oldest to the front.

The bell over the door goes at four minutes past eight and it is Mr. Dolan for his paper, the same paper, and he says the same thing about the weather, and she says the same thing back, and neither of them has ever found this tiresome.

Chapel Street. Mill Road. The Terrace. Station Road.

That is the whole of it. She was born on Mill Road, she has lived on the Terrace since she married, and she has walked between them roughly forty thousand times, and she has worked in this store since she was twenty-four years of age.

Her sister went to the city at nineteen and has an office with her name on the door of it. At Christmas she tells people, warmly, meaning it kindly, that Rita never left the four streets. It is said with love and Rita smiles every time and it goes in like a splinter every time as well.

Around half past nine she gets to the sweet corn and her knees complain and she sits back on the low stool by the freezer for a minute, which is not really allowed, and she looks down the aisle at the light coming across the counter.

And the thought arrives the way it does, quietly, without any drama, sounding entirely reasonable.

There is nothing in this. Thirty years and there is nothing in it that anybody would want. No story. Nothing you would stand up and tell. Tomatoes, beans, sweet corn, the paper at four minutes past eight, and the four streets, and then it will be over.

She says it to the freezer, not out loud, and then she gets up and finishes the shelf, because the shelf is not going to do itself.

She does not know that Mr. Dolan has been on his own since March and that four minutes past eight is the only time in the day that anybody says his name. She has no idea. She thinks it is about the paper.

What He was doing sitting opposite the treasury

There is a scene in Mark that everybody remembers for the wrong half.

Jesus goes into the temple, and He does not teach, and He does not heal anybody, and He does not turn over a single table. He sits down opposite the treasury, and He watches people. That is the verb. He beheld. He sat in a busy building on an ordinary day and He looked at ordinary people doing an ordinary thing, and He kept looking, long enough to notice the one that nobody else in that building noticed.

And there came a certain poor widow, and she threw in two mites, which make a farthing.Mark 12:42

Two of the smallest coins in circulation. The sound they made would have been lost inside the sound everything else was making. Not one person in that courtyard turned around.

And it is in the Book. It is in the Book, and the names of the impressive ones in the same courtyard on the same morning are not.

You are being watched by the same eyes that were on that courtyard, and you were being watched long before you did anything worth watching. I am not saying that to make you feel better about the shelf. Mark 12:42 is written down and it has not moved, and the Holy Spirit is what turns a written line about a courtyard in Jerusalem into something that lands on a low stool by the freezer at half past nine.

Notice what He did not say about her. He did not say she was secretly extraordinary. He did not say there was hidden greatness in her that everybody had missed. He said she was poor and that the coins were small, plainly, without softening a word of it, and then He said she had put in more than all of them.

Small was the fact. Small was also the point.

You have been counted already, and the counting did not wait for the life to get bigger. Scripture put the widow into the permanent record with her poverty named out loud, and what the Spirit adds this morning is that He has never once revised His method since.

Small was never a smaller version of big

Here is the thing that has been quietly wrong in your hearing, and it did not come from Scripture.

We were handed a scale. On the scale, a life is measured by distance traveled and by number reached, and everything is the same kind of thing in different sizes, so a small life is simply a large life that did not happen. On that scale, four streets is a rounding error.

God does not appear to own that scale.

Look at the material He keeps choosing. A boy's lunch. A widow's two coins. A jar of oil. A cup of cold water. Twelve men from a fishing town with no education between them, which the officials in Acts 4 remarked on out loud, and which was not the obstacle they assumed it was. A carpenter's shop for thirty years and three years of ministry, and nobody has ever suggested the thirty were the waiting room.

You were made out of the material He actually uses, and you were made out of it deliberately. That is not a compliment about you and it is not meant as one. First Corinthians 1:27 says He chooses the things the world calls foolish and weak and nothing, it is written in exactly that register, and the Spirit is not embarrassed by the sentence. He is the One who makes it stop stinging.

You do not have to become interesting for this to hold. If it depended on becoming interesting it would be the same scale again, wearing a Bible verse.

You are ordinary, and ordinary is what the sentence about light was spoken over. Matthew 5 has Him saying it to a hillside of small town people with jobs to get back to. The word says it in that setting on purpose. What the Spirit adds is that He has not swapped the setting since, and He is not looking for a bigger hillside.