It Was Awkward And I Never Did It Again

He did it once. It was nine years ago and he can still feel the room.

A man from work had lost his father, and he had been at the funeral, and about three weeks afterwards, on a Saturday, he had a strong sense that he should go and sit with him.

Not to say anything. That was the specific shape of it, and he remembers being slightly surprised by how clear it was: go and sit with him.

So he drove over. He had not rung first, which he now thinks about a lot.

The man answered the door in the middle of doing something and was perfectly polite and perfectly baffled. There was a conversation on the step for about four minutes. There was a moment where he tried to explain why he had come and could hear it going wrong as he said it. He did not go in. The man said thanks for coming by, twice, in the way people do when they want you to leave.

He drove home and sat in the car outside his own house for a while.

And he has never done it again. Not once in nine years.

He did not decide that. There was no moment where he sat down and made a rule. It is more that something in him quietly filed the whole category under tried that, and every time since, when something similar has arrived, he has felt the step and the four minutes before he has felt anything else.

And what he has never once looked at, until about a fortnight ago on this porch, is the actual question.

It was awkward. Was it wrong?

Those are two different things and he has spent nine years treating them as one.

And that is you on your own step, or you would have gone in by now.

The man who was criticized for the best thing he ever did

Let me give you Peter, because what happened to him is worse than a doorstep and he tells the story himself.

He is prompted to go to a house he should not go into. He says so plainly:

And the Spirit told me to go with them, making no distinction.Acts 11:12

He goes. It turns out to be one of the hinges of the whole New Testament, the moment the door opens to everybody who is not a Jew, and there is no question in the text at all about whether the prompting was real.

And when he gets back to Jerusalem, the believers there criticize him for it.

You went to uncircumcised men and ate with them. That is what he walks into. Not applause. A room of good people who think he has embarrassed himself.

He has to sit down and explain it point by point, from the beginning, and he does, and the chapter records the explanation at length because the criticism was serious enough to need answering.

You are not the first person to obey a prompting and stand there afterwards being looked at. It is written that the Spirit told him to go with them, making no distinction (Acts 11:12), and the criticism came afterwards and did not change what it was. The Holy Spirit sent a man into a situation that cost him a difficult conversation.

Now let me say the thing about your Saturday, and I want to be careful and honest about it, because there is a lesson in it and it is not the one you took.

You did not ring first.

That is a real thing and it is worth saying plainly. A man three weeks into losing his father was answering a door in the middle of doing something, and he had no warning, and it put him on the spot.

That is a lesson about how, not about whether.

You are allowed to have learned something about the manner without concluding anything about the sending. It is written that everything should be done decently and in order (1 Corinthians 14:40), which is about how a thing is carried out and never about whether it should have been. The Holy Spirit is not the awkwardness and He is not put off by it either.

And here is what nine years has hidden from you.

You have no idea what that Saturday was.

You saw four minutes on a step and you have written the whole account from those four minutes. You do not know what he thought about on the Sunday. You do not know whether anybody else came in those three weeks. You do not know whether thanks for coming by was a dismissal or a man three weeks in who could not manage a conversation and said the only thing he had.

You are holding a verdict on an afternoon you only saw the first four minutes of. It is written that we walk by faith, not by sight (2 Corinthians 5:7), and a doorstep is about as much sight as a person can get. The Holy Spirit was not confined to what you could observe from the path.