The Streets Will Be Full Again

Marlene still wakes at twenty to five, which is a thing a body does not unlearn on account of a school board vote.

Thirty-one years in that kitchen. She could tell you what four hundred and ten servings of chili weighs going into the warmer, and which of the two ovens ran hot, and the names of every child who could not have the peanut butter. In June they closed it and put the buses on a route down to the consolidated school, forty minutes each way, and there was a supper in the gym where a man from the county said a great many words.

Now she walks up past the playground most afternoons because it is on the way to nowhere in particular and she goes anyway.

The merry-go-round still turns. The tetherball pole has no ball on it and has not had since spring. The hopscotch grid painted on the blacktop is down to a two, a five and most of a seven. There is a swing with the chain shortened on one side where somebody wrapped it over the top bar years ago and nobody ever got it down.

Herschel is on the bench. Herschel is ninety and Herschel is always on the bench.

"You are standing," he said, without turning around.

"I am."

"You have been standing there a good while."

Marlene said she had just been walking by, which they both knew was not the whole of it, and he did not say so.

"I have been coming to this bench since before the school," he said. "It was a pasture. My mother's people ran a store where the parking lot is."

She thought about that.

"So why do you still come?"

"Three o'clock," he said. "Habit." And then he moved his cane over against his knee and knocked twice on the boards beside him.

She sat down.

And that is what there was on the corner of that lot at ten past three on an ordinary Tuesday: two old people on a bench, and the swings going a little in the wind with nobody on them.

If you are living in the after of something, you know exactly what she was doing standing there and calling it a walk. You are expected somewhere real, and that expectation is not a wish you talked yourself into. Scripture puts an actual gathering ahead of God's people and describes who is at it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a promise like that hold in a town where the buses go the other way now.

Look at who is sitting down in that verse

The plain shape first, because on this site the subject is a company and never a private feeling.

The bride in Scripture is the church. A whole people out of every century and every emptied town, spoken of as one because Christ committed Himself to all of it at once. So the thing ahead of us is a gathering of a people, not a private arrangement and not a romance. It is a great many chairs and a great deal of noise. You are inside that company, and you have a place at what is coming. That is written and not guessed at, and the Holy Spirit is the one given now as the guarantee of the part that has not arrived yet.

Now read the picture God actually paints, and read it slowly, because everybody misremembers where it starts.

Old men and old women will once again sit in the squares of Jerusalem, each one with his staff in hand because of their great age.Zechariah 8:4

That is the first frame. Not the children. The old people, on the benches, with their canes beside their knees, in the squares of a city that at the time of writing was mostly rubble and a construction argument. The next line is the one everybody quotes, the streets full of boys and girls playing in them. But God begins the picture with the ones who are too old to be anybody's projection, sitting down in the middle of town in broad daylight because they are safe and unhurried and at home.

You are in the first frame of that picture already, and it is not a consolation prize. That is what Zechariah has written, and the same Spirit who spoke it over a wrecked city is the one who makes it a live word rather than an old one.

What this is, and what it is not

Let me be plain about the boundaries, because a woman like Marlene has heard optimism before and it has cost her.

This is not a forecast about that town. I do not know whether the school reopens, and neither does anybody who tells you otherwise, and I am not going to trade you a real promise for a guess about a county budget. Nothing here says your street refills.

It is not a date, either. There is no timetable in this and there are no signs to read off the news. Anyone handing you a calendar is selling something.

And it is not a wedding photograph. The picture God gives is a city with the doors open, benches full, and noise in the streets. It is a homecoming supper, not a private moment. You have a seat at a public, crowded, noisy gathering of a whole people, and that is already yours. The word describes it plainly and it is the Holy Spirit who is the deposit on it, which means the thing is paid down and not merely hoped for.

So what is it, then. It is the one thing in this article that is not a maybe. You are expected at a table that God Himself set, and your being there is already settled. Scripture says the people He has kept are gathered in at the end of it, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a fact you stand on rather than a feeling you work up.

That is not a small thing to be handed on a Tuesday. It means that expecting something good is not sentimentality. It is accuracy.