The Long Way Round the Market

Wednesdays the square fills by half past seven and empties by two, and the whole thing goes up and comes down again inside seven hours, which is a kind of miracle nobody in that town has ever remarked on.

Fruit and vegetables at the top end. A man with plants who is only there when he has plants. Two clothes rails and a stall of household things that has an unrepeatable range and always has exactly the thing you need. The fish van, which comes from the coast and which everybody defends.

She had the third pitch on the left for nine years.

Cheeses, mostly, and some other bits, and a folding table with a cloth she ironed on Tuesday nights because her mother would have. She knew everybody. She knew which of the old men wanted to talk and which wanted to be served quickly and left alone, and she knew the name of every dog that came through that square.

She has not been across it in two years and eight months.

Not because of anything to do with the stall. She still shops on a Wednesday. She goes to the same shops. But she goes the other way round, up past the bank and along by the church wall, and it adds four minutes, and she has never once explained the four minutes to anybody, and nobody has ever asked.

The reason she stopped is not something she did. It is what somebody else did, a long way back, that surfaced in a bad year, and the square is where she was standing when it did.

Let me say who I am speaking to before I say anything else. Today I am speaking to you, the one whose weight belongs entirely to what another person did. I am not going to ask you what it was. Not now, not later, not at the end of this. Nothing here wants the thing itself.

And one more thing, before you brace for it: nobody is going to set you a pace. Not me, not this site, not God, and stopping going somewhere is not a sin and nobody here is going to treat it as one.

The first person in Scripture to name God

There is a woman in Genesis who is out in the wilderness because of what was done to her by people with power over her, and she is on a road going away from a house, and she is pregnant and alone by a spring.

An angel finds her there. Not in the house. Out where she went.

And she says something afterward that nobody had ever said before her.

And she called the name of the LORD that spake unto her, Thou God seest me.Genesis 16:13

Look at what has just happened, because it is remarkable and almost nobody points at it.

She is the first person in the whole of Scripture to give God a name. Not a patriarch, not a priest. A mistreated foreign woman on her own by a spring in the desert, and the name she gives Him is about His eyes.

Thou God seest me. She had gone where nobody would follow, and Somebody had.

You are seen by God in the exact place you went to be unseen, and you were seen there before you ever noticed. I am not offering you a warm reading. The written word puts the naming in her mouth and puts the seeing before the sending, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it onto a route round the back of a church wall.

He never asks her to account for going

Now the part I want you to hold on to for the rest of the week.

Read what the angel says to her, and then read what he does not say.

He does not ask her why she left. He does not tell her she was wrong to go. He does not require an explanation, an apology, or a plan, and he does not tell her she should have been stronger. He asks her where she has come from and where she is going, which is a question you ask a person you are about to help, and then he speaks to her about her future and about the son she is carrying.

That whole encounter contains no requirement to account for the absence.

Which is exactly what I am not going to do to you either. You stopped going. There is no fee, and there is nothing owed to that square, and if you cross it and somebody says we have not seen you in ages, you may say something about being busy and mean nothing by it and walk on. That is allowed. That is entirely allowed.

You are free to come back without a story in your mouth, and you were never asked for one by God. Scripture records the whole conversation and records no such demand, and it is His Spirit, not an explanation you have got ready, who walks a person back across a square.