A Place To Stop Running

Philippians 1:27–2:4

I know the geography of running. Before God got hold of me, my life was a series of addresses that were never homes — places to sleep, not places to belong. You learn to travel light. You learn not to unpack, because unpacking is a kind of hope and hope was expensive.

Simon (not his real name) knows that geography too. Temporary housing, short stays, a rented room in Geylang. He took on work of an illegal nature not because he was bent towards evil, but because it was simply what the men around him were doing. That is how it happens. You do not choose a life; you absorb one. Whoever stands nearest to you when you are lost becomes your teacher.

He came to TCE @ URA and something quietly changed. Not dramatically — he did not weep at an altar. He learnt to dial in a grinder. He learnt to wipe down a bar properly. He learnt to work beside men and women whose habits were diligent rather than desperate, and he began to absorb that instead. They serve together. They take their siesta together. They laugh at each other. They cover for one another when the lunch rush turns brutal. And when the shutters come down, they sit around a hawker table and eat.

Paul, writing from a prison cell, tells the Philippians to stand firm in one spirit, striving together as one. Then he presses further: if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort of love, any fellowship of the Spirit, make my joy complete by being of one mind. Do not look only to your own interests, but to the interests of others.

That is not a management technique. That is a household.

I confess I have not always led it as one. There have been seasons when I ran our café like a business that happened to employ broken people — when I was short with a Restarter who was slow, when my own anxiety about the day’s takings made me a poor brother rather than a patient one. God has been patient with me in this. I am still learning that the shop is not mine. It is His, and the people in it are family before they are staff.

I see the same thing in Changi with Crossroads. A man walks into the Bible study carrying years of moving on, and what disarms him is rarely an argument. It is a room where nobody is going anywhere. Belonging preaches before we do.

Simon is not finished. Neither am I. But he has stopped running, because somewhere between the espresso machine and a shared plate of satay, he found people worth standing still for.