He Keeps Inviting Him To Things Instead Of Answering

The neighbor moved in about fourteen months ago and they have got on from the start.

They have done the ordinary things. A ladder was borrowed. There was a bad week with a burst pipe and two men in a hallway at eleven at night with towels, which is the kind of thing that makes people friends faster than anything else.

And three times now the neighbor has asked him a real question.

Standing at the gate, mostly. Once with a mug in his hand. The kind of question people ask when they have decided you will not laugh at them for it, which is a decision somebody makes about you before they open their mouth.

And every time, he has invited him to something.

Not dismissively. Warmly, and with genuine hospitality, because he is a hospitable man and it is his instinct: there is a thing on Thursday, come with us. Or, we have people round on the first Sunday of the month, you would be very welcome.

The neighbor has said yes to none of them.

Three invitations, three polite declines, three more questions since.

And what he has slowly worked out, over about the last month, is that the man is not avoiding him. He is not shy about crowds either; he goes to the pub quiz and knows more people on that street than anybody.

He just does not want an event. He wants an answer, from the man he already trusts, at the gate, in about four minutes.

And there is a reason the invitation keeps coming out instead, which took longer to see.

At an event, somebody else does the answering. There would be a person there who is good at this, and the neighbor would get something better than anything he could produce, and he would not have to stand at a gate and say what he actually believes to a man he sees every day.

That is the whole of it, and he has known it for about a week now.

And you have a neighbor, or a colleague, and you keep offering them a room instead of a sentence.

Go home to your own people

There is a moment in Mark where a man who has just been through the most dramatic thing in the chapter asks to come along, and is refused, and told to do something much smaller and much harder.

He begs to go with Jesus in the boat. It is a completely reasonable request from somebody in his position.

And he did not permit him but said to him, "Go home to your friends and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you."Mark 5:19

Go home to your friends. Your own people. The ones who knew you before.

Not to a gathering. Not to somebody more qualified, and not into the company of the people who do this professionally, which is precisely what he was asking for.

He is sent back to the exact place where everybody already knows him, to say a plain thing about what happened.

You are being sent to a gate rather than to a gathering, and that is the harder assignment and it is the one in the text. It is written, go home to your friends and tell them how much the Lord has done for you (Mark 5:19), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an ordinary man able to say a plain thing to somebody who has known him for fourteen months.

Now the reason underneath the invitations, since you have already found it.

At an event, somebody else answers. That is the whole mechanism and you named it yourself last week, and it is worth saying plainly that this is not cowardice in the ordinary sense.

It is a hospitable man's version of the same thing everybody does: routing a hard moment toward somebody better resourced, while remaining warm and doing something genuinely kind on the way.

And it has not worked, because the man does not want the thing you keep offering.

You have been offering hospitality where a sentence was being asked for, and hospitality is not a substitute even though it is real. Scripture says let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person (Colossians 4:6), and the operative word is answer, and it is His Spirit who supplies it at the moment somebody is standing at your gate.

And the decision he made before he opened his mouth.

You noticed it yourself: he asks the way people ask when they have decided you will not laugh at them. That decision was made about you, over fourteen months, on the strength of a ladder and a burst pipe and whatever else he has observed.

That is a considerable thing to have been given and you have not yet used it.

You have been trusted in advance and the trust was earned in a hallway at eleven at night with towels. It is written that a friend loves at all times (Proverbs 17:17), and it is the Holy Spirit who builds that kind of standing between two men over fourteen ordinary months, which is not something anybody arranges.

And what he would get at an event, which is worth being honest about.

He would get a better answer. That is probably true. The person who is good at this would say it more clearly than you.

And it would not be from you, and he would weigh it accordingly, because a stranger's excellent answer at an event is information and a neighbor's clumsy answer at a gate is testimony, and those two things do entirely different work in a person.

You have the one thing the better answer cannot include, which is that it comes from you. It is written, you will be my witnesses (Acts 1:8), and a witness is somebody who says what they have seen, which requires no expertise at all and cannot be delegated to anybody, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries a witness where no expert was ever going to reach.