The Two Who Walk to the Bus Together

Twenty past six and the street is doing that thing it does in the summer where it is fully light and completely empty and belongs to about four people.

Delphine walks. Eighteen minutes to the stop at the end of the long road, and she has done it for nine years, and it is the best part of her day and she means that.

She prays the whole way.

Out loud sometimes, under her breath mostly, and it is not a discipline she has to make herself do. It is a walk with God down a road with the light coming sideways off the parked cars, and she comes off that bus at the other end a different woman from the one who would have got on it without the eighteen minutes.

She is fifty-five. Nine years of that.

And there are two women who join the same road at the corner by the mailbox, about halfway, and walk the rest of it together.

They talk the entire way. Delphine is usually about thirty yards behind them and she has been watching them for years.

And there is a thing in her about it, and she has never said it out loud, and it is not vicious. It is just there.

They are chatting. She is praying.

It goes through her most mornings in some form. A small settled sense that her eighteen minutes are of a different order from theirs, and it has never crossed her mind to examine it, because it is not the kind of thought a person examines.

This morning she is closer. Not deliberately; she left three minutes later and they left four minutes later and the arithmetic put her about eight feet behind them at the corner.

And she can hear.

They are taking turns. One of them is praying out loud, by name, for somebody's daughter and a hospital appointment on the eleventh, and then she stops and the other one starts, and it is not performance and it is not tidy, and one of them says something about a woman on their road that makes the other one laugh in the middle of a prayer.

They do that for the whole rest of the road. All the way to the stop.

Delphine walks eight feet behind two women praying out loud for people by name, with her own prayer stopped in her chest.

You have that thought. Yours might be about something else entirely and yours is probably not vicious either. But you know the small settled sense you carry about how you do it, and you know you have never once examined it.

God is described as leaning in

Malachi is the last book before four hundred years of silence and most of it is God arguing with people who have gone cold. And then, near the end of it, there is one verse about a completely different kind of conversation.

Then they that feared the LORD spake often one to another: and the LORD hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that thought upon his name.Malachi 3:16

They spake often one to another.

To each other. Horizontally. Not to God, in that clause; to one another, which is the direction Delphine has spent nine years quietly considering the lesser one.

And then: the LORD hearkened, and heard it.

Hearkened is a leaning word. It is what you do when you turn your head toward something because you want to catch it. God is described, in the middle of a book about people who have gone cold, as leaning in to listen to two people talking to each other about Him.

You have been overheard, and God is described as leaning toward the conversation between people, and it is already written down that way. That is the written word and not my correction on a road at twenty past six, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a verse from the last book in that testament and lays it on a sidewalk with the light coming sideways off the cars.

And then the strangest part of the verse.

A book of remembrance was written before him.

He wrote it down. Not a private prayer, not a public act of worship, not anything anybody did in a temple. A conversation between people who feared Him, on some ordinary road, in some ordinary week, went into a book, and Malachi says it was written before Him, which means in His presence, as it happened.

And then the possessive

The very next verse does not wait.

And they shall be mine, saith the LORD of hosts, in that day when I make up my jewels.

They shall be mine. It follows immediately, and it is plural, and it is about the same people who were talking on a road.

That is a great deal of weight put on two women having a conversation. God leans in, God writes it down, and God says they are His, all inside two verses, and the whole thing starts with people speaking one to another.

This is yours, and what passes between two people who fear Him is described as recorded, and it is already settled. Malachi 3 says a book of remembrance was written before him in exactly those words, and the same Spirit who inspired the last book before the silence is the one making it a present fact in a woman eight feet behind two others.

Now let me guard this the way this site guards it.

I am not telling you your nine years were second best. They were not. Your eighteen minutes with God down that road are real, and God has been in every one of them, and nothing in this article takes a single morning of it away.

And I am not telling you the answer is to join a group or go to more things. That is not what the verse describes; it describes two people walking to a bus stop, which is about as far from a program as it is possible to get.

And if you are reading this with genuinely nobody on your road, you are not outside this sentence. Malachi does not say the ones who had somebody. He says them that feared the LORD and them that thought upon his name, and the naming today can be somebody four hundred miles away.

What I am telling you is that the thought you have carried for years about the two of them has no verse under it, and that the direction you considered the lesser one is the direction God is described as leaning toward.