The Card In The Bottom Of Your Bag

It has a coffee stain on the corner now and the date on it has passed.

She took a handful of them in February, from the little stand by the doors, and put them in the side pocket of her bag, and she has moved that bag from chair to chair and from car to hallway for eight months, and the cards have gone with it.

There have been opportunities. That is the part that makes her wince.

The woman at the desk at the dentist who said, unprompted, that she was having the worst year of her life. The man who cleans at the office who has told her twice, both times on a Friday, that he does not sleep. Her cousin, at a family thing in June, who asked her outright, in front of two other people, what it is that she gets from church.

She said, "Oh, I just like the people."

She has thought about that answer probably fifty times since. She was not ashamed. That is what she keeps coming back to and it is what makes the whole thing so confusing to her. She was not ashamed of Jesus in that kitchen in June. She just could not, at that particular second, find a way to be honest in front of two extra faces, and by the time she could, the conversation had moved to somebody's holiday.

Eight months. A handful of cards. A coffee stain.

And now a low grade verdict living in the bottom of that bag alongside them: that she is not the kind of person who does this.

Go near, and join thyself

There is a man on a desert road in Acts who gets one of the strangest and most useful instructions in the New Testament.

Then the Spirit said unto Philip, Go near, and join thyself to this chariot.Acts 8:29

Hear that with the bag on your shoulder. You are sent, and no script was ever attached to the sending. The word says go near, and join thyself to this chariot, and it is the Holy Spirit who did the sending and has already arrived.

Go near. Join thyself.

That is the entire instruction. He is not told what to say. He is not given an opening line, a testimony structure, a card or a leaflet. He is told to close the distance and to attach himself to a moving vehicle, which is undignified and physical and involves running.

And what happens when he gets there? He asks a question. Understandest thou what thou readest. And the man in the chariot answers, and invites him up, and every single thing that follows comes from that.

So take this where you sit, and know it is not my pep talk, it is what is written: you are sent, right now, without a script. His word records the Spirit saying go near and join thyself, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the sending and who has already gone ahead into every conversation you are afraid of.

Nothing in that verse is a card. The instruction was proximity.

There was a preacher in England in the seventeen hundreds who is remembered for enormous crowds in fields, and the crowds were real, and here is what is not usually said about him.

He was terrible at it, at first, and he hated it.

He was a precise, orderly, university educated clergyman who thought preaching outdoors was almost indecent. He wrote about it. It offended his sense of order. And then he did it, because the people he wanted were at the pit head and in the market and in the prison, and they were not coming into a building, and somebody had to close the distance.

Fifty years of going near. Coal pits at five in the morning. Prisons, over and over, with people who could give him nothing.

He never once ran the gathered church down. He loved it and stayed in it until he died. He simply refused to let a doorway be the condition of a conversation.

Going near is not a personality type. He proved that. It is a decision made by somebody it does not come naturally to.