I Still Walk To The Shop

Twenty past eight in the evening. That is when his feet start.

It used to be twenty past eight because that was when the shop stopped being busy and the woman who worked Tuesdays and Thursdays went off, and she was the one who used to say something, not unkindly, just something, and he preferred to go when she was not there.

He has not bought that particular thing in four years and two months.

And he still walks. Out the back gate, up the lane, past the Hendersons, over the little bridge where the tarmac goes bad, right at the postbox, and down to a shop that closes at nine, and he buys something small, because you cannot walk into a shop and buy nothing, and he walks home.

Chocolate, usually. Sometimes a paper he does not read.

He has never told anybody that he still does it. His wife knows he goes for a walk in the evening and thinks it is good for him and it is good for him. What she does not know is that it is not a walk. It is a route, and it is the route, and his feet do it the way a horse walks a track.

He is fifty-one. Four years and two months, one day at a time, and he is not being modest about that and he is not fragile about it either. It was the hardest thing he has done and it is done.

But there is a thing that happens on the little bridge where the tarmac goes bad, roughly every third time, and it is this: he becomes aware, quite suddenly, that his body knows this road, and a voice that he would not dignify by calling it a voice says, very reasonably, nothing has actually changed about you, has it.

And he keeps walking, and he buys the chocolate, and he goes home. But he takes that sentence home with him, and it sits somewhere for a day or two, and it has been doing that for four years.

What the road actually proves

I am going to say the plain thing first, because I think a man who has done four years and two months deserves plain.

The road proves nothing about you.

Not one thing. Not that you are secretly unchanged, not that it is waiting for you, not that anything is unfinished. A road in a village is a set of physical facts about tarmac and a postbox, and your feet know it because feet learn things and yours had four hundred opportunities to learn this one.

The sentence on the bridge is not a report. It is an old accusation that has learned to arrive at the one moment in the week when a man is most likely to receive it, which is halfway along a road he used to take for another reason.

Now here is the fact that is actually true about you.

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.2 Corinthians 5:17

Look at the tense of every clause. Is a new creature. Are passed away. Are become new. Present, present, present. Nothing in that verse is scheduled. Nothing in it is contingent on a man never again finding himself on a familiar bit of tarmac.

You are a new creature and old things are passed away, and that is not encouragement from me, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing on the bridge rather than in the general theology you would already have agreed with.

Now let me say something about the walk itself, and I want to be careful, because I am not going to tell you what to do with it.

I am not going to tell you to stop walking it. That would be me, from here, with no knowledge of your life, deciding something about the one habit that has been carrying a man through four years, and there are perfectly sensible people who would say the route is doing you good and perfectly sensible people who would say the opposite, and neither of them is on that bridge.

What I will say is this. You are not walking that road as the same man. The road is the same. The postbox is the same. The bad tarmac is the same. The man is not, and Scripture says so plainly, and the Spirit of God who has been with you through four years and two months is the reason it has been four years and two months.

I want to say something about the chocolate, too, because I think you have been slightly ashamed of it.

You buy something small because you cannot walk into a shop and buy nothing. There is a whole man's dignity in that sentence, and I would not have you lose it. You have found a way to walk a hard road and come home clean four hundred times, and the word says all things are become new, and the Spirit is the one who has been making that walk end at your own back gate for four years.

And here is the last one, and it is for a man on a bridge on about the third time.

You have already been made new and the road did not get a vote. The accusation on that bridge is not new information and it is not honesty and it is not humility. It is an old thing that has passed away, still using the road. The written word puts it in the present tense three times over, and the Holy Spirit is the reason a man has walked that lane clean four hundred times.