Women in the Sun

“Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” — Matthew 7:14 (KJV)

Bunyan worked as a tinker too, walking from village to village mending things. One day his work took him to Bedford, and in one of the streets he came across “three or four poor women sitting at a door in the sun, and talking about the things of God.” By now he thought of himself as a bit of an expert on religion, so he drew near to listen. “I heard, but I understood not.”

They weren't talking about rules. “Their talk was about a new birth, the work of God on their hearts.” They talked about how God had shown them his love in Jesus, about the promises that had comforted them, and about their own unbelief and how useless their own goodness was. And they talked like happy people: “methought they spake as if joy did make them speak.” To Bunyan it was as if they had found a new world.

His heart began to shake. He realised he had never once thought about a new birth. He went back to his work, but their conversation went with him, and he kept finding excuses to go back and listen again. He noticed two new things inside himself: a soft, tender heart, and a mind that wouldn't stop thinking about God. His mind, he says, hung on to it “like a horse leech at the vein.”

Not everyone he knew was going the same way. He had a close friend named Harry, a hard swearer, whom he now stopped spending time with. When they met in a lane and Bunyan asked him why he swore like that and what would happen to him if he died, Harry snapped back, “What would the devil do for company, if it were not for such as I am?” The poor man who had first got Bunyan reading the Bible joined a group called the Ranters, who taught that people who had reached their kind of perfection couldn't sin whatever they did. Bunyan, unsure what was true, prayed one of the most sensible prayers in the book: “O Lord, I am a fool, and not able to know the truth from error: Lord, leave me not to my own blindness.”

But his anxious mind found new things to worry about. How could he know if he had faith? He decided the only proof would be a miracle. Walking between Elstow and Bedford, he was about to tell the puddles in the road to dry up and the dry places to become puddles. Then he thought he had better pray first. Then he thought: if I pray and it still doesn't work, that will prove I have no faith at all. So he didn't try.

Around this time he had a kind of dream. He saw the Bedford people sitting on the sunny side of a mountain, while he shivered in the snow outside a wall. At last he found a tiny gap and squeezed through, head first, then his shoulders, then the rest of him, and sat down with them in the sun. He understood the wall as God's word and the gap as Jesus, the way to the Father, and the gap was narrow for a reason: “here was only room for body and soul, but not for body and soul, and sin.”

Look at the difference between the puddles and the mountain. The puddle test was Bunyan trying to prove himself to himself. The gap in the wall was God showing him that the way in is a person, Jesus, and that you can't drag your old life through with you. And look at what drew him in the first place: not an argument, but ordinary people whose faith was so real that joy made them talk.

One thing to do this week: find one person whose faith seems real and joyful to you, someone who talks about God like those women in the sun. Ask them one honest question this week: how did God first become real to you?