Led by the Hand Into the City

Loretta is standing at the edge of the curb outside the pharmacy with her bag over her wrist, and she has been standing there for about ninety seconds.

The light down Main Street this time of the afternoon comes in low from the west end and gets in under the awnings and lies flat along the concrete, and it is exactly the kind of light her eyes cannot do anything with. In the middle of everything she looks at now there is a soft gray place, and around the edges she sees fine. So she knows there is a curb. She knows there is a street. She knows the drugstore is behind her and the bench is on her left because she can feel the end of it against her hip. What she cannot tell, standing here, is where the drop is, and whether the white truck she can hear is coming or idling.

Forty years she drove everybody in this town. She drove her mother to the eye doctor in Beckley. She drove the Ferris girl to her wedding when the car broke down. She was the one who carried the casserole up the steps and got the door with her elbow and told everybody else to sit down and let her do it. That is not vanity. That is just what she was, the same as some people are tall.

Denny from the hardware store comes out with a box under one arm and sees her.

He does not make a production of it, which she notices and is grateful for. He just comes over and stands on her right side and says, afternoon Miss Loretta, and then he says, here, and he holds his arm out where she can find it.

And there it is. The whole thing, the entire war, in the two seconds before her hand moves.

Because taking it means something. That is the part nobody understands who has not stood at a curb like this. It is not the arm. The arm is a kindness and Denny is a good boy and his mother raised him right. It is what she has to agree to in order to reach for it. She has to agree that she is a woman who is helped across streets now. She has to let go of a sentence she has carried her whole life about who does the helping in this town and who gets helped, and she has stood on the right side of that sentence for four decades.

The white truck goes past. It was moving after all.

Somewhere down the block somebody laughs, and the light keeps coming flat down Main Street, and Denny stands there with his arm out and does not rush her.

Loretta's hand comes up off the strap of her bag.

The road where the most self-sufficient man alive got led in

There is a man riding to Damascus with letters in his saddlebag.

Understand what those letters were. They were authority, in writing, from the highest religious court there was, and he had gone and asked for them himself. He is a Pharisee of Pharisees, trained under the best teacher of his generation, and he is riding into a foreign city to run an operation of his own devising. There is nobody in that account who needs less help than the man on that road.

And an hour later he is on the ground, and he cannot see, and this is how he goes in.

And Saul arose from the earth; and when his eyes were opened, he saw no man: but they led him by the hand, and brought him into Damascus.Acts 9:8

They led him by the hand. Same city, same gate, same road he had planned to ride through, and he goes in on somebody's arm like a child.

Now here is the part that matters, and it is a matter of what the text does and does not say. Scripture does not narrate one word of that as a fall. Nobody in the chapter says he has been reduced. There is no note about how far he has come down. The very next thing that happens to that man is that Heaven sends somebody across town with his name in his mouth, and inside three days he is preaching in the synagogues of that same city, and the whole rest of the book runs on him.

You are being led in, and Scripture has never once called that a demotion. That is what is written in Acts 9:8, plainly and without any editorial comment on the man's dignity, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line about a hand on a blind man's elbow and lays it down on a sidewalk outside a drugstore.

And look what the being-led was. It was not the interruption of his assignment. It was the first line of it. The whole thing starts with him on somebody's arm.

You have not lost your standing by needing an arm. The written word does not grade a person on how much of the road they cover unassisted, and the same Spirit who filled that man three days later is not keeping a separate register for people who got helped across.

What she is actually being asked to agree to

Now, nobody is going to stand here and tell Loretta that her independence was pride and she ought to repent of it. That would be a cheap thing to say to a woman who spent forty years carrying casseroles up other people's steps, and it is not true, and it is not what is happening on that curb.

Being the one who drives everybody was a good thing. It fed people. It got the Ferris girl to her own wedding. Nothing about it needs apologizing for now.

What is happening is smaller and stranger than a correction. She is being moved across a line she drew a long time ago without knowing she drew it, between the people who give and the people who receive, and it turns out that line was never in Scripture. It was in the town. It was in her.

There is a thing Jesus said to Peter at the very end of John's gospel, and He said it right before He said follow Me. He said that when Peter was young he girded himself and went where he wanted, and that later on another would gird him and carry him where he would not choose. And then, in the very same breath, with that hanging in the air, He said follow Me.

Being carried was not the end of following. It was inside the following. Jesus put the two sentences next to each other on purpose and did not soften either one.

You are still under the same orders you were under when you were the one driving. God's assignment on a person does not get downgraded when their eyes do, His word says He carries and delivers even to old age and gray hairs, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes a promise like that an actual weight-bearing thing on a corner in the late afternoon.

And it needs saying plainly, because a page that pretends otherwise is no use to anybody: there are days when no arm comes. Denny is not always outside the hardware store. Some afternoons a person stands at that curb and there is nobody, and that is real, and nothing here is going to paper over it.

You are led by God on the corners where nobody is standing, and that is not a consolation prize. Isaiah 42:16 says He will bring the blind by a way they knew not, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is the One who is present at an empty curb as much as at a crowded one.