The Family Who Parked at the End

The cookout starts whenever the first grill gets going and finishes whenever the last person leaves, and it has been like that on that stretch of sand for about thirty years.

Four tables end to end. Two grills. A cooler that somebody's uncle guards like it is a bank. Small kids in the shallows in their clothes because nobody thought to bring anything and nobody minds. A radio that only one person is allowed to touch.

Sam is on the tongs, which is a position of some authority, and he is happy, and it has been a good afternoon.

At about half past five a car comes into the lot and goes all the way down to the far end and parks under the tree by the fence, which is a long walk from everything and the worst spot in the lot on any other day.

Nobody gets out.

Sam sees it, and everybody at the tables sees it, and nobody says anything, and after a minute the whole lot goes back to what it was doing. He can see four heads in that car. A woman in the driver's seat with both hands still on the wheel.

He knows the family. Not well. There is a history there with somebody's brother and a thing that happened, and there is another layer under that which is older than the incident and older than Sam, which is that when he was seven years old he was given a list.

Nobody sat him down. That is not how a list gets given. It is a face somebody makes when a name comes up. It is a sentence that stops halfway. It is who was at the table and who was talked about at the table. By nine he could have told you exactly which families were which, and he has never once in fifty years said any of it out loud, and he would be genuinely offended if you told him he had a list, and the car is at the far end of the lot with four people in it and none of them are getting out.

Then his aunt gets up.

She is seventy-eight and she has never hurried in her life. She fills two plates. Not small ones. She walks the whole length of that lot in the sun, past every table, taking her time, and Sam stands at the grill with the tongs in his hand and watches her go, and something in his chest is doing a thing he has no name for.

You have stood at that grill. Your list came from a different table. But you know you have one, and you know the shape of the face people make, and you know you have never once said it out loud.

God took the list off a man who was praying at the time

Acts 10 is the hinge of the whole book, and the thing I want you to notice is where Peter is standing when it happens.

He is on a roof. He has gone up there to pray, at noon, which is not a required hour, which means he is being more devout than he has to be. He is hungry and waiting for lunch and praying on a roof, and that is the moment God chooses to take his list away from him.

And he said unto them, Ye know how that it is an unlawful thing for a man that is a Jew to keep company, or come unto one of another nation; but God hath shewed me that I should not call any man common or unclean.Acts 10:28

God hath shewed me. Peter does not say, I have thought about it and become more open minded. He does not present it as personal growth. He says God did this to me, and the doing of it took a vision repeated three times and then three men standing at the door, because Peter argued with it twice.

You have been shown something, and the showing is God's work and not your broad thinking. That is the written word and not my hope for you at a cookout, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a rooftop in Joppa and sets it down on a strip of sand with the grills going.

And here is what should make every one of us go quiet. The list lived inside the devotion. Peter was not a careless man who happened to be prejudiced. He was praying at an hour nobody made him pray at, and the list was in him the whole time, and it had never once occurred to him that it was a problem, and he was able to say the words unlawful thing with total sincerity because he had been handed it at seven years old, the way you were.

No respecter of persons

Later in that same chapter Peter opens his mouth in a Roman soldier's house and says: of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons.

Perceive. He is working it out while he is standing there. This is not a man delivering a settled position; it is a man watching his own furniture get moved and saying so out loud in the room where it is happening.

You are standing in a house He sent you into, and it is already settled that He is no respecter of persons. Acts 10 says it in Peter's own mouth in a foreigner's front room, and the same Spirit who fell on that household before Peter had even finished the sermon is the one making it a present fact in a man holding a pair of tongs.

Now let me guard this the way it needs guarding. This is not a message about being undiscerning. Scripture is not naive about who a person walks with and neither am I, and there are people it would be foolish to put yourself under. Discernment about character is real and it is not what we are talking about.

A list is a different thing from discernment, and here is how you tell them apart. Discernment looks at a person and reads what is actually in front of it. A list arrives before the person does. Sam has never spoken to the woman with her hands on the wheel. He does not know one thing about her. She was sorted before her car came into the lot, and that is not discernment, that is inheritance.

And the people who handed you your list mostly did not know they were handing it over. Some of them were protecting you from something real that has long since stopped being real. Nobody is being prosecuted here. There is an aunt with two plates walking the length of a parking lot in the sun.