I Asked for a Gift and Got a Street

She had a list. She would tell you that cheerfully because she is not embarrassed about it and does not think she should be.

It was a real list, on paper, in a notebook, written when she was twenty six in a season when she was serious about this in a way she has never entirely lost. Three things on it, and she is not going to say what they were, and she has asked for those three specific things for seventeen years.

She is forty three.

None of the three has arrived, in the sense of arriving that she meant when she wrote them down.

What has arrived is a street.

She does not think of it that way and would probably resist the phrasing, so here is the evidence. She knows the names of everybody on both sides for six houses in each direction. She knows which of them has somebody in a facility and which of them lost a job in February. She is the one the family at number nine came to when their eldest went missing for two days, and she was the one who found him, on the phone, in about forty minutes, because she knew who to call.

None of that was planned. She did not set out to be that woman and she does not particularly identify as her.

And every single time she has asked for the three things, something in the following weeks has turned out to involve a name off her street, and she has never once connected the two.

The sentence, unsaid: I keep asking for the list and the answer keeps arriving as somebody knocking.

You may know that notebook. Three things asked for faithfully, and something else that keeps turning up.

The list has one thing at the front

There is a famous list in Galatians and almost everybody reads it as an inventory, which is nearly right and not quite.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith.Galatians 5:22

Read the verb. Fruit is. Singular. Paul does not say the fruits are, plural, and the grammar has been noticed by commentators for centuries because it appears to be deliberate.

He is describing one thing with several aspects rather than a menu of items to select from. And the first word in it, sitting at the front of the whole cluster, is love.

You have been given one thing rather than a selection, and Galatians 5:22 puts the fruit in the singular with love at the head of the list, and it is His Spirit who takes a sentence in the middle of an argument about freedom and lands it on a woman with a seventeen year old notebook.

Love is the least tradeable item

Consider what having love at the front of that list actually does to the reading.

Every other item can be described in the abstract. A person can have joy on their own. Peace can be an internal state. But love has an object by definition. It is the one word on that list that cannot be exercised in a room by itself, and putting it first means the whole cluster is pointed at somebody before it gets going.

Which means a woman who keeps finding names in the way of her list has not been having her request declined. She has been getting the front of the list, repeatedly, for seventeen years, in the only form it can possibly arrive in.

And that is not a consolation reading of her situation. It is the plainer one. If love is at the head of what the Spirit grows, then a person into whom the Spirit has been poured is going to end up entangled with people, and the entanglement is the crop rather than the weather that keeps ruining it.

You have been receiving the first item every single time, because the written word puts love at the head of a fruit named in the singular, and the Spirit of God is what turns a point of grammar into seventeen years reorganized.

And notice where Paul is in the argument. He has just spent a chapter and a half defending freedom against people who wanted a list of things to do, and this is what he offers as the alternative. Not nothing, and not another list, but a description of what grows.

You are inside something being grown rather than issued, and Galatians 5 uses the language of fruit rather than of distribution, and the same Spirit who produces it is the one who fills.

The list was never a bad idea

Now the thing that has to be said, because a woman who has asked faithfully for seventeen years should not close this article feeling foolish.

There is nothing wrong with the notebook. Asking God for specific things is what the whole book is full of, and a twenty six year old who wrote three things down and has asked for them ever since is not somebody with a technique problem. She is somebody who kept praying for seventeen years, which almost nobody does.

And the three may still come. Nothing here says they will not, and nobody gets to tell her they were the wrong things.

What is worth putting down is only the arithmetic she has been running underneath, which has quietly scored seventeen years as unanswered. That scoring is the thing that has cost her, and it is the thing that is wrong, and it is wrong on the plain reading of the verse rather than on a generous one.

You were never wrong to write them down, because Galatians 5:22 adds a reading rather than canceling a request, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that an expansion rather than a correction to a faithful woman.