Folding Clothes On Cedar Street

Tuesday and Friday, both, and she has been going to the same place on Cedar since her machine went out in the spring of 2014 and she decided not to replace it.

There is a bench by the window and there are four folding tables and there is a dryer at the end that everybody knows to leave alone.

She knows most of the faces. There is Renata, who comes with three loads and two children and does the whole thing in an hour and a half like a woman running a shift. There is the one everybody calls Miss Dot, who is older than she is and does not fold, she rolls. There is a young woman who has come most Fridays for about two years now and who cries sometimes, quietly, while she waits, and nobody has ever said anything about it.

Eleven years. Two days a week. That is a thousand mornings, near enough.

And she could tell you what every one of those women thinks about the heat, and the price of the machines going up, and how long it takes the big dryer.

That is all she could tell you.

She is a believer and has been since she was nineteen and it is the load bearing thing in her whole life, and in a thousand mornings on Cedar Street it has never once come out of her mouth.

What she says about that, and she says it without any drama, is: "It is a laundromat, honey. Folks are just trying to get their washing done."

Which is true. And it is also the sentence that has kept eleven years at the weather.

He drew near and went with them

Two people are walking a road out of Jerusalem, in the worst week of their lives, and there is a sentence about what Jesus does that ought to be the training manual for every believer who ever stood beside somebody at a table.

And it came to pass, that, while they communed together and reasoned, Jesus himself drew near, and went with them.Luke 24:15

Take that at the folding table. You are already alongside, in the posture He used. The word says Jesus himself drew near, and went with them, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept you on Cedar Street twice a week for eleven years.

Drew near. Went with them.

He did not stop them. He did not stand in the road and address them. He came up alongside two people who were already walking somewhere and walked at their speed in their direction.

And then He asked what they were talking about. That is the second thing He does, and He does it knowing the answer, because the point of the question was never information.

They walked a long way like that. Seven miles, and He let them talk, and He listened to two people explain the crucifixion to the crucified.

So take this at your folding table, and know it is not my comfort, it is what is written: you are already alongside, right now, twice a week, in the exact posture He used. His word says He drew near and went with them, and it is the Holy Spirit who has had you at that table on Cedar Street for eleven years for a reason nobody has yet told you.

There was a preacher in England in the seventeen hundreds who is remembered for crowds in fields, and who spent more of his life than anybody counts simply walking alongside people.

Sitting with the dying. Going into prisons and staying. Down in pit villages, in kitchens, at bedsides, asking working people plain questions and staying for the answers.

The movement he built was made of ordinary people doing that on their own streets. Visiting. Sitting with the sick two doors down. Not one bit of it required a building or an occasion, and the people doing it mostly had no education and would have been horrified to be called preachers.

He never ran the gathered church down. He loved it and he stayed in it until he died. He simply understood that most of what God does through people happens at somebody's shoulder rather than from a platform.

Your shoulder has been beside those women a thousand times.