The Market Heard It First

Nabil grew up two streets from the market and he now walks into it the way a man walks into cold water.

He knows the length of it exactly. Forty one stalls from the arch to the far end where the herbs are. He used to be able to do it in eight minutes and he used to enjoy every one of them, because he knew all forty one of them by name and most of them had known his father.

Now it takes him about four minutes because he does not stop.

The thing happened a year and a half ago, and by the time he came back the story had already been the length of the market twice and had improved considerably in the telling. That is what a market does. It is not malice. It is what human beings have always done with news in a place where people stand next to each other all day.

Here is the exact shape of the difficulty, and it is more precise than people who have not lived it imagine.

Nobody is cruel to him. Nobody says anything. That is almost the trouble. What happens is a set of very small adjustments: a greeting that is a half tone shorter, a conversation that does not extend into a second sentence, a man who is very busy with his crates at the exact moment Nabil goes past, which he might well have been anyway, and Nabil will never know, and the not knowing is its own daily tax.

And there is a second thing, and it does not belong in any complaint.

The story that went round is substantially true, and some of the people who were most affected by it live within four hundred yards of that arch. They did not put the word out, and they did not owe him silence, and they have their own version of the last eighteen months which he does not get to narrate.

So this is not going to be a message about how the market was wrong to know.

And this is where I stop writing about Nabil, because you have a street.

It might be a market, or a school gate, or a small industry where everybody knows everybody. I am not going to ask what happened, and I am not going to suggest the people who know should not know it.

Somebody takes you up

I want to hand you a line that people quote about difficult families and which is actually about something much wider: it is about what happens when the people who are meant to hold your name stop holding it.

When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up.Psalm 27:10

Take me up. In the older sense: gather me in, receive me, pick me up off the ground and bring me inside.

And notice the structure of the sentence, because it is not a complaint. It is a hinge. The first half names the worst version of losing your standing, which is losing it with the people who gave it to you in the first place. The second half does not argue with the first half. It puts something underneath it.

Now put that in a market. A market gives a man his standing by repetition: forty one people who know his father, who know his voice, who put his bread aside before he asks. When that goes half a tone shorter, the standing goes with it, because that is where it was being kept.

So take this into the four minutes between the arch and the herbs. You are taken up by God on that exact street, and Psalm 27:10 says the Lord will do the gathering, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a man able to walk it slowly again.

And here is what that verse does not do, which is the reason it is trustworthy.

It does not say the market was wrong. It does not say the people who adjusted their greeting owe you anything. It does not put you in the right, and the Holy Spirit has never used it that way in anybody. It steps entirely around the question of who was right and states where you are being held while it remains unresolved, and the written word leaves the rest with God, who is a better judge of it than either of you.