A Stranger In The Queue

Cerys was buying milk and the woman in front of her was buying a great deal of nothing much, and it came in about four seconds.

Not a feeling about her. A specific thing, with a detail in it that Cerys could not have guessed and would have had no reason to invent, about a situation that woman was in.

Cerys stood there holding a bottle of milk.

She thought about saying something for the length of the transaction, which was maybe ninety seconds, and every version she constructed sounded insane. Excuse me, I think God has told me something about you. In a supermarket. To a woman who was clearly in a hurry and who had already glanced at her once.

So she said nothing. The woman paid and left, and Cerys paid and left, and she sat in the car park for a while.

That was two years ago and she still thinks about it most months.

The version of the story she tells herself has hardened over those two years into something that is not quite fair. In the hardened version she is a coward who was given something for a person in trouble and would not open her mouth because she was worried about looking mad.

There is a truer version available and she has never quite been able to hold it, which is: a woman in a queue received something she had no framework for, in ninety seconds, with no relationship, no context and no safe way to deliver it, and did the only thing that was actually available, which was to pray about it afterwards in a car park.

She is thirty-eight. She has never told anybody, because the telling would require explaining the whole thing, and she cannot face the face.

You may know that queue.

Maybe you got something about somebody you will never see again. Maybe you have also spent years quietly calling that cowardice. And maybe nobody has ever offered you the other reading.

Somebody already knew all of it

There is a psalm that opens with a description of how thoroughly one person is known, and the relevant thing for you is who is doing the knowing.

O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off.Psalm 139:1-2

Thou understandest my thought afar off.

Now, the psalm is written in the first person about the writer. But apply it where it obviously applies. That woman in the queue was already known. Completely, in detail, including the situation Cerys glimpsed four seconds of.

Which means the moment in that supermarket was not the only line of communication available to God regarding a woman He had been thoroughly acquainted with since before she was born.

That is worth sitting with for a minute, because the hardened version of your story assumes something enormous: that a person's help depended on whether you spoke in ninety seconds, and that your silence closed a door.

And she was already known, thoroughly, before you were ever in that queue. The written word describes a knowledge that is complete and afar off, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman who has been holding a bottle of milk for two years.

And you are not the only channel to anybody. The word says the LORD looketh from heaven, he beholdeth all the sons of men, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than making one shopper responsible for a stranger's whole situation.

Why you could not deliver it

Now let me say plainly why the silence was not cowardice, because the reasons are structural and you have never had them listed.

There was no relationship. Nothing you said would have had anywhere to land, because a stranger has no reason to receive anything from a stranger.

There was no time. Ninety seconds at a till is not a setting; it is a queue with people behind you.

There was no way to be wrong safely. If you had spoken and been wrong, that woman carries a strange encounter for a year. If you had spoken and been right, she carries a stranger knowing something private about her in a supermarket, which is not obviously better.

And there was no consent. She had not asked, and had glanced at you once, and was in a hurry.

Any one of those would be a reason for care. All four together is not cowardice; it is a correct reading of a situation with no safe delivery available.

And you did the thing that was actually available, and it was not nothing. The word says the effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much, and it does not require the subject to be present or informed, and the Spirit is the one who carries a thing said in a car park.

And nothing about you is under review for the ninety seconds. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman who has been running a hardened version of her own story for two years.

What it might have been for

One more thing, and I offer it as a possibility rather than an explanation, because I do not know and will not pretend to.

You have assumed the thing was given so that you would say it.

That is one option. Here is another: sometimes a person is shown something so that somebody prays, and the praying is the whole of the assignment, and the person prayed for never knows and was never meant to.

That would make the car park the point rather than the failure.

I am not telling you that is what happened. I am telling you it is on the list, and it has not been on your list for two years, and a list with only one item on it produces a verdict every time.

And what you are given may be for praying rather than for saying. The word says pray one for another, and it puts no requirement on the other person's knowledge of it, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a real assignment rather than a consolation.