Polite in Both Chapels

There are four hundred yards between them and Bethan has been walking that stretch since she was a girl.

Two buildings. Two congregations, both of them small now. Both of them descended from one that split in her grandmother's time over something that Bethan could explain to you but which nobody under sixty in that valley could.

She goes to one. She has always gone to one.

But her cousin is in the other, and so is the woman who nursed her mother, and there are funerals and there are anniversaries and there is the thing they do in the spring, and over fifty years Bethan has become somebody who is warmly welcome in both buildings and belongs, in a way she can no longer describe, to neither.

She is seventy-four.

And what she saw in March, at a funeral tea in the other one, is what fifty years of that has actually made her.

Somebody said something at that tea. Not unkind, but pointed, about the people in her building, said in front of her by somebody who had forgotten which one she goes to.

And Bethan smiled and said something warm about the sandwiches.

She has done that, she would guess, four hundred times. In both directions. In her own building she has smiled and moved a conversation along when somebody said something about the other one, and in the other one she has done the same, and she has been doing it since she was in her twenties.

And she has always called it keeping the peace, and in March, walking the four hundred yards home, she used a different word.

I have been being liked.

Fifty years of it, in two buildings, and she cannot point to one occasion when she said a true thing in either, and the reason she cannot is that saying one would have cost her the welcome, and the welcome was the only thread left between those two chapels and she has been the thread.

And you may know that walk. Yours may be a family or a town rather than a valley, and you may be welcome everywhere, and you may have started to wonder what that has cost.

What completes joy is being of one mind, not being liked by both

Take this off first, my love, because you have carried it for fifty years and it was never yours.

You are not the thread between those two buildings. You never were. Scripture describes what completes joy and it is a shared mind rather than a shared welcome, and it is the Holy Spirit, not your good manners, who joins anybody. Set it down here in the doorway. It is heavy, and four hundred yards is a long way to carry it four hundred times.

Now hear the sentence, and hear what is asked for.

Then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind.Philippians 2:2

One in spirit and of one mind.

Not on good terms. Not welcome in both. One in spirit, which is a thing you cannot arrange by managing yourself, and of one mind, which is a thing two parties do rather than a thing one person maintains by never saying anything.

And notice that it is put as what completes somebody's joy. It is not a duty in that sentence. It is what a man says he would be made glad by, which is a much softer and much larger thing than an instruction.

That is what you have wanted for fifty years, and wanting it was never the same as maintaining it. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who makes people of one mind, and He has never once assigned that to a woman with good manners in a doorway.

Now let me be careful, my love, because there is a ditch here.

Nothing here says the fifty years of walking that stretch were wasted, or that being welcome in both is a failure of nerve. It is not. There are people in both buildings who have been carried by you at their worst, and neither congregation would let anybody speak against you, and Scripture does not scorn a woman who kept walking.

And nothing here is telling you to say the true thing at the next funeral tea. That is a decision with a whole valley in it and it is not one a page can make, and there are seasons where the sandwiches are the right answer.

The point is only that being liked and being one are different things, and Scripture asks for the second and never once asks anybody to produce it single-handed. His Spirit is the one who does it.

Here is the tender part, and I say it as I would over a pot of tea. What you found on that walk is not a moral failure.

It is a woman of seventy-four discovering that a habit she began in her twenties, for good reasons, in a valley that needed it, has become the whole of her, and there is grief in that and there is no villain anywhere. His Spirit has been on that four hundred yards with you every time.