The Neighbor Across the Hall

He has wanted this for eight years and he could tell you the month it started.

A man he worked with prayed for somebody in a break room and something happened, and he was three feet away, and he went home that night and has not been the same about the subject since.

He has read a great deal. He has asked twice, properly, on his own, and he would say without hesitation that something was given both times. He is not a man standing outside a door. He is a man who has been inside for years and is still asking for more.

What he has never once done, in eight years of wanting it, is ask what it is for.

That is not a criticism and it has never occurred to him as a gap. The wanting is entirely genuine. But if you sat him down and asked him to describe what receiving looks like in his life at the far end, he would describe something happening in him, and there the picture stops.

There is a woman across the hall in 4B.

She has been there four years. He knows her name and she knows his. He knows, because everybody in that building knows, that her sister died in the spring and that nobody comes.

He has thought about knocking probably thirty times.

The sentence, unsaid: I have been asking for eight years for something and I have never asked who it was for.

You may know that hall. Years of wanting, and a door you keep walking past.

The sentence finishes with a purpose

There is one verse where Jesus says plainly what the power is for, and almost everybody stops at the comma.

But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem, and in all Judaea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth.Acts 1:8

Everybody remembers the first half. Read the second. The power arrives and then the sentence keeps going, and where it goes is to other people.

Witnesses. That is a word about somebody else being told. It is not a description of an inward state, and Jesus does not offer one anywhere in that sentence.

You have been reading half of the one verse that answers this, and Acts 1:8 finishes on witnesses and on a list of places rather than on anything happening inside the person, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who takes a sentence said on a hillside and lands it on a man who has walked past 4B for four years.

The list starts where they are standing

Consider the geography in the second half, because the order of it is the practical part.

Jerusalem. Judaea. Samaria. The uttermost part of the earth. Four items and they widen, and the first one is the city they are standing in at the time He says it.

He does not begin at the far end. He begins with the immediate, the local, the people already in the vicinity, and the widening happens outward from wherever the person happens to be.

That ordering is worth pausing on, because the instinct of a man who has wanted something for eight years is to look for a large use for it. Something proportional to the wanting. A trip, a call, a room. And the sentence He actually gives them starts with the address they slept at the night before, which is the least impressive possible place to begin and the only one available to everybody.

You are already standing in the first item on that list, because the written word begins the widening at the place the hearers were standing rather than at the horizon, and His Spirit is what turns a piece of geography into a door number.

And notice that the purpose does not make the power conditional. He does not say receive it in order to. He says you shall receive, and then you shall be, in that order, with the second following from the first rather than paying for it.

You are not being handed a bill for the eight years, and Acts 1 puts the receiving first and lets the witnessing follow, and the same Spirit who came on those men is the one who fills.

Nothing here is an obligation

Now the thing that has to be said carefully, because a man like this is entirely capable of turning this article into a task.

The woman in 4B is not a debt. Knocking on that door is not the price of the last eight years and it is not a condition attached to the next asking. If he never knocks, God is not withholding anything from him, and nothing in Acts 1 says otherwise.

What is being offered is smaller and better than a duty. It is the discovery that the thing he has wanted for eight years already has an address in his own building, which turns a private hunger into something with somewhere to go.

And it is worth saying that the same applies to a reader who cannot see the purpose yet at all. Some people receive and it is years before anything about it looks like it is aimed anywhere. That is not a lesser filling and it does not mean the asking landed differently. The order in the verse is receiving and then witnessing, and nobody is being timed on the second half.

You were never given a task attached to the asking, because Acts 1:8 states a consequence rather than a condition, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a relief rather than one more thing on a list.