He Turned Around In The Road

Delisha was seventeen steps down Marlow Street when she stopped, and she can tell you it was seventeen because she counted them going back.

The letter was in her bag. Housing. After two years and four months of a situation that involved three moves, a sofa, her mother's spare room and a period she does not talk about.

She had come out of the office and her feet had just started going, because that is what feet do, and she was already composing the voice note to her cousin. She had the phone in her hand. She had the first sentence.

And seventeen steps down Marlow Street something in her chest went sideways and she stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk and a man behind her had to go round.

She stood there.

And then she turned round, physically turned round, in the street, and looked back up the road at nothing in particular, at a housing office and a bus shelter and a shop that sells phone cases, and she said, out loud, at a volume that was frankly not appropriate for a Tuesday morning, "THANK YOU."

Two women at the bus shelter looked at her. One of them smiled.

Delisha says now that she has no explanation for why it had to be out loud and no explanation for why she had to physically turn round, and that if you had described that scene to her a week earlier she would have found it embarrassing.

She rang her cousin about four minutes later, standing outside the shop that sells phone cases, and told her everything, and cried, and her cousin cried.

But she says the seventeen steps back up the road are the part she thinks about. Not because the cousin mattered less. Because in two years and four months of that situation, that was the first time she had stopped in the middle of something to say anything to God that was not a request.

You have felt that pull. Something good lands and your feet start going and there is a tug somewhere behind your sternum that says turn round, and you have almost certainly overridden it, because you are an adult in a street and there are people at the bus shelter. And nobody has told you that the pull is not a duty, and that it is allowed to be loud.

One Man Turned Round, And Nobody Here Is Counting The Rest

There is a story in Luke about ten men who were healed on a road and one who came back, and it has been used to make people feel bad for two thousand years, which is a remarkable achievement for a story about somebody being glad.

"And one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, and with a loud voice glorified God, and fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks."Luke 17:15-16

Read what is actually in that sentence. He saw. He turned back. Loud voice. Face down. Thanks.

Now hear this plainly, because it is the reason this article is written the way it is: we are not counting the other nine. They were sent somewhere. They were doing what they had been told to do. This page is not going to run an audit on nine men who did exactly as they were instructed, and it is not going to run one on you either.

You are being shown one man's gladness and not a chart of anybody's failure. Luke 17 gives us a man on a road with a loud voice, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and lands it in a woman standing still on a sidewalk while somebody goes round her.

And notice the volume. With a loud voice. It is written into the text. This was not a discreet inward moment of gratitude conducted at a socially acceptable level. The man made a scene on a public road.

You have permission for the volume, and it was in Scripture long before it was in you. That is what the written word records about the one who turned round, and it is the Spirit of God who is behind the tug in the chest that stops a person in the middle of a street.

Gladness, Not Duty, And Never A Ranking

Now the part that must be said clearly, because this is the exact place where this story is normally taught badly.

Delisha ringing her cousin was not a failure. Telling people is not the lesser thing. If your good news goes to your mother first, or your group chat, or the person who sat with you through the bad part, that is not a fault and there is no ledger anywhere with your name on it recording the order.

What is being described is not a duty you owe God before you are allowed to be happy with humans. It is something simpler and better: He is glad, He is right there, and the turning round is what a person does when they suddenly notice that.

The one man in Luke 17 did not turn round because he had worked out an obligation. He turned round because he saw. The seeing came first and the turning was what came out of it.

You are not in arrears on gratitude, and the pull you feel is affection rather than accounting. It is written that we love Him because He first loved us, which puts the whole direction of this on His side before it is on yours, and His Spirit is the one who has been quietly generating the tug you keep overriding.

And say the guard, because this is where a glad thing becomes a heavy one in a single sentence. Nothing on this page is a requirement. There is no order you owe, no volume you have to reach, no words that must be used, no audit of your last two years, and nothing routed to any person or work anywhere at all. If you never turn round once, you are exactly as much His at the end of Marlow Street, that is the written shape of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this from becoming a test.