Four People Before the Crossing

She is still holding the appointment card when she gets outside, and the card is now the least interesting object in the world, and she goes on holding it anyway.

The high street at that hour is a river. Buggies, a man carrying a ladder sideways, two lads eating chips out of paper, everybody moving with their chin down. She joins it, and her thumb is already going.

Her sister first, because obviously. Then her mom, who will ring back rather than reply. Then the group chat with the three from work, who fire back a row of little exploding shapes inside ten seconds. Then Denise, who is not family and is not work, who prayed with her in a corridor once and has asked after it every week since without ever making it awkward.

By the crossing she has told four people, and she is grinning at the sidewalk like somebody who has got away with something.

The green man is taking its time. Twelve strangers waiting alongside her, one of them humming.

And that is where the small odd thought arrives. Not a scolding. Not a shadow across the good thing. Just a thought, standing there on the curb with her: she has not said anything to the One she actually asked.

You know that thought. It has turned up in a corridor, or a stairwell, or halfway through a sentence to somebody else. It has never once made you feel good. And it is not supposed to make you feel bad either, whatever you have been taught.

The four people were not a mistake

Let me get the tone of this right before anything else, because this subject has been used as a stick and I am not going to pick it up.

Telling your sister first was not a failure. The impulse to tell people is one of the loveliest things about a human being: good news will not sit still in a person, it goes out looking for a face. God made that. He is not standing at the back of a line with His arms folded, counting how many got there ahead of Him.

So nobody here is asking you to audit those four. Leave them exactly where they are. They were told by somebody glad, and gladness has never been a limited supply that ran out before it reached heaven.

You are welcome to be glad in every direction at once, and you were welcome to it the second the news landed. Scripture never once shows God as a slighted guest at somebody's good day; the written word shows Him as the giver of the thing you were texting about, and it is His Spirit who put the gladness in you that made you want to tell anybody at all.

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.James 1:17

Notice which way the arrow points there. Down. The gift came down before it was ever in your hand, it came from a Father, and the word chosen to describe Him is light. Not a payer. Not a distributor. Not a mechanism with a slot in it. Light, with no shadow anywhere in Him, and nothing about Him that flickers.

The first is about who gets recognized

Here is the whole of this subject, and it is smaller and warmer than most people expect.

Bringing God the first of something is not a payment and it is not a fee. It says one thing and one thing only: I know where this came from. That is everything it has ever meant.

In the old picture, a family carried a basket at the beginning of a harvest, stood in front of God, and said the story out loud with their own mouths. We were nothing. We were in trouble. He heard us. He brought us out. This came up out of ground He gave us. Nobody in that scene is settling an account. It is a person refusing to let a good thing be anonymous.

And the argument somebody has probably had at you, about proportions and obligations and what is owed, is not the subject of this page and this page declines it. Nothing here is asking you for anything at all.

You have a Father who gave it, and you have Him whether or not anybody ever taught you what to do about that. Scripture puts the giving before any response, every single time it tells the story, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a giver recognizable behind a gift.

While it is still new

There is something specific about the word first, though, and it has nothing to do with rank. It has to do with temperature.

Good news has a half life. Within an hour it has been told, absorbed, congratulated and folded into the admin of the day: who else to ring, what it means for August, whether the parking has run out. By the evening it has quietly become information. The thing that was hot in your chest at the crossing is now simply something you know.

Saying it to Him while it is still warm is not obedience. It is the difference between showing somebody a photograph of a fire and standing next to the fire with them.

You were given the gladness as well as the gift, and it is yours to spend on Him while there is still heat in it. The word invites thanks in everything, which turns out to be a doorway into the best part of a day rather than a duty bolted onto the end of it, and His Spirit is the one who keeps the warmth in a thing that would otherwise cool into news.

Nothing here is being asked of you

I want to be plain about this, because people arrive at this subject braced.

There is no bill on this page. No proportion, no figure, no threshold, no step you owe anybody. If your circumstances are hard right now, nothing here is aimed at you and nothing here is describing you. And beginning something with God does not secure, protect or increase anything: it is not a lever and He is not a lock.

What it does is put the source in the room while the joy is still in it.

You are already His, and the good thing already came out of His hand, so nothing you do next is buying a thing. The written word says He gave His own Son before anybody had thought to ask, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land as generosity rather than as accounting.