The Bins Still Out on Tuesday

For the one who keeps noticing and keeps waiting to be told.

Two wheelie bins are still at the curb outside number eleven on a Tuesday evening, and they've been there since the lorry came on Monday morning.

The gate is open. The path is about twenty feet, and it's flat, and there's a step at the top of it with a handrail somebody fitted a few years back.

You know who lives there. You have known for six years, without ever once having had a proper conversation with her, in the way that neighbors on the same road often manage not to.

It'd take you ninety seconds. You've worked that out precisely, more than once, standing at your own window with a mug in your hand, and you've never done it.

The reason you've never done it is that nobody has asked you to. For eleven years, everything you did was because your name appeared beside a date on a printed list, and the list ended four years ago, and nothing has replaced it.

There is no assigning clause in that sentence, and you've spent four years waiting for a line that was never written. The written word gives the liberty first and the serving second, and the Spirit prompts what no rota ever could.

What the List Was Actually Doing

Be fair to the list, because it did something real and losing it has cost you more than you've admitted.

It solved a genuine problem. In a large group, work needs distributing, and a printed list distributes it reliably. Without one, the same four people end up doing everything while the other sixty do nothing at all, which is a well known failure with a well known remedy.

You were one of the four, for most of those eleven years, which is part of why the list mattered to you. It protected you. A list is the only thing standing between a willing person and everybody else's assumption that the willing person will simply carry on.

But a list does a second thing without meaning to, and this is the part that's caught you. It converts noticing into waiting. Once a system exists for deciding who does what, the natural response to seeing a need is to wonder whose it is.

Eleven years of that trains a person thoroughly. You have retained every instinct for noticing, which is why you can see two bins from a window at all, and you have lost the connection between the noticing and the moving.

That connection used to be automatic. When you were nineteen you would have had them inside the gate before the thought had finished forming, and nothing about your body or your willingness has changed since. Only the wiring in between.

The list turned noticing into waiting, and you kept only the first half. The written word makes love the thing that assigns, and the Spirit is the one pressing on you at the window.

Love Is the Only Mechanism Named

Here's the verse, and what it contains and doesn't contain is the whole argument.

For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another.Galatians 5:13 (KJV)

By love serve one another. Love is the mechanism. It's what identifies the need, selects the person, and issues the instruction, and Paul names no other authority in the sentence at all.

There is no clause about roles, no mention of appointment, and nothing whatever about waiting to be recognized by anybody. A believer with liberty and love in them is the entire apparatus the verse describes.

That was not an oversight on Paul's part. He was writing to people who had come out of a system with a great many offices in it, and he had every reason to name one here if one had been required.

Paul said that to congregations arguing bitterly about who was entitled to what, and it reaches past them to a man at a window watching two bins.

Love is the only mechanism named in the sentence. The written word gives no other authority, and the Spirit uses that one on ordinary evenings.

Ninety Seconds Has No Approval Process

Look at the scale of what you're deliberating over, because the scale is comic and the comedy is useful.

Ninety seconds. Two bins, twenty feet, a flat path. No skill required, no cost, no risk, and no possible way for it to go seriously wrong for anybody involved.

You've deliberated over this more than a dozen times. You've calculated the duration. You've noted the handrail. You've observed the pattern over several weeks and formed a reasonable view about why it's happening.

All of that analysis is the residue of a system that had to allocate scarce effort across a great many competing needs. You're applying an institutional process to a ninety second act of kindness twenty feet from your own front gate.

The process is not neutral either. Every round of deliberation makes the next one heavier, because now there is a history of not having done it, and the history itself becomes a reason. Nine weeks of that and a man can no longer remember why it ever seemed simple.

You're running an allocation process over ninety seconds and twenty feet. The written word prescribes love rather than a process, and the Spirit has been pressing this on you for weeks.

I Am Not Telling You Structure Is Bad

Be careful, because a man who has lost something good can be talked into despising it, and that would be a poor exchange.

Rotas are useful. Organized work is how a hospital gets cleaned and how a hundred people get fed on a Saturday. The eleven years you gave to a printed list were real service, and I won't have them diminished by anybody, including you.

Nor am I saying you should never be part of an organized effort again. If one opens and it's right, join it, and bring everything you learned in those eleven years with you.

What I want off you is the four years of standing at a window. Not the willingness. Not the eleven years.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Eliana This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.