The Porch Two Doors Down

Ruby sits out most evenings from about seven, on her own steps, with a glass of tea sweating on the boards beside her, and from where she sits she can see the whole of Loretta's porch two doors along.

For eleven years she was on it.

Three, four evenings a week. Bowl of beans between them some nights, nothing at all most nights. Loretta talking. Loretta has always been the talker and Ruby has always been the one who says mm and hm at the right places, which is a job, and Ruby was good at it.

She stopped nine years ago, the summer she was converted.

There was no falling out. That is the thing she would want you to know first, if you asked her, which nobody has. There was no incident. What there was, was talk. Loretta's porch runs on talk and a certain amount of that talk is about people who are not on the porch, and some of it is not kind, and Ruby was not just present for it, Ruby was good at it too. She could put a sentence on somebody that would still be sitting on them at Christmas.

So she stopped going. She did not explain, because she did not know how to explain without it sounding like what it would have sounded like. She just started being busy, and then started waving.

Nine years of waving. From her steps to that porch, twice an evening, going in and coming out. And Loretta waves back every single time.

Tonight is a good evening, warm, the light going long and gold down the road, and Ruby is sitting there with her tea and she looks along and she sees what she has been seeing for nine years and not looking at.

There are two chairs out on Loretta's porch. There have always been two chairs out on Loretta's porch. Every evening for nine years that woman has carried a second chair out and set it beside her own.

You have got a porch two doors down. Yours might be a phone number, or a sister, or a table you stopped sitting at. But you know the summer you stopped, and you know you never explained, and you know you have been telling yourself it was obedience.

Paul wrote the address into the verse

Philippians 2 is a chapter about how to live where you are, and this verse has the location built right into it, twice, which is not an accident.

That ye may be blameless and harmless, the sons of God, without rebuke, in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation, among whom ye shine as lights in the world.Philippians 2:15

In the midst of. Among whom. Paul says it twice in one sentence because he is not describing a mood, he is giving an address. Blameless is not a thing you achieve at a distance and then look back at the world from. It is what you are, standing in the middle of it, with people on all sides of you.

You have been placed in the midst of it, and that is where the shining is described as happening. That is the written word and not my opinion of your evening, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a letter written from a prison and sets it down on a set of front steps with a glass of tea sweating on the boards.

And notice that a light removed from the midst is not blameless. It is absent. Those are two different words and only one of them is in this verse.

Ruby has spent nine years working hard at the first half of the sentence and quietly deleting the second half, and the second half is where the sentence says the work is done.

And the other word is harmless

Now the word beside blameless, which does not get preached nearly as often. Harmless.

Blameless is mostly about what is true of you. Harmless is about what happens to other people because of you, and it is a separate requirement, and it is right there in the same clause.

Here is the hard, kind thing. Leaving without a word is a thing done to somebody. Nine years of waving from two doors down is not a neutral event in Loretta's life. She has drawn her own conclusions about it, because people always do, and there is no version of those conclusions that is not some form of she thinks she is better than me now.

That is not said to shame you. God knows the woman who did the leaving was doing the only thing she could think of to do about something real. But blameless and harmless are two words and you have been carrying one of them.

You are able to be both, and it is already yours, and the second one starts with a chair. Philippians 2 puts them side by side in the same clause, and the same Spirit who moved Paul to write it from a cell is the one making it a present fact on a warm evening on a set of wooden steps.

Let me guard this the way I would on my own porch. I am not telling you the talk was fine. It was not fine and you were right that it was not, and you were right that you were good at it, and there is nothing in this message that asks you to pick that back up. A woman who knows exactly which sin has her name on it is not a woman anybody should be careless with.

But there was another way to handle it and nobody showed it to you, which is to go and sit in the chair and be a person who does not say that kind of thing any more. Not announce it. Not correct anybody. Just sit there being a different woman for nine years, on a porch, where she could see you.