Lending To The Lord

The casserole is the reason she has mostly stopped.

Four years ago, a family down the road, something awful, and she did what her mother would have done and made too much food and took it down there. And standing on that doorstep with a dish in her hands she heard herself say a sentence so patronizing that she still thinks about it in the shower.

She will not repeat it. It was not cruel. It was the kind of sentence that comes out of somebody who is nervous and is trying to be gentle and has accidentally used the voice you use with children.

The woman took the dish and was perfectly nice about it, which somehow made it worse.

And since then, a pattern. She notices something. She thinks about doing something. And then she runs the sentence forward in her head and hears how it will sound, and she decides not to, and she tells herself that the family probably has plenty of people already.

She is thirty-six and she is one of the kindest people you would ever meet and she has helped almost nobody in four years, because she cannot find a way to do it that does not feel like standing over somebody.

If you have got a doorstep sentence you still think about, come and sit down. Nobody is going to make you say what it was.

The verse rearranges who is standing over whom

Here is a short verse that solves her specific problem, and it solves it by changing who is in the room.

He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the LORD; and that which he hath given will he pay him again.Proverbs 19:17

Now. Before anything else, so that nothing is muddled: I am not going to tell you what you get back. That second clause is God's business and it is not the subject here, and this page has no interest in your return and never will.

What I want is the first clause, and specifically the geometry of it.

Lendeth unto the LORD. Not to the person. To God. God puts Himself on the receiving end of the transaction and takes it out of the hands of the person you were worried about patronizing.

Think about what that does to a doorstep. She thought she was a woman with a dish standing over a family in trouble. On this verse she is a woman handing something to God, in a doorway, with a family present.

That is not a nicer way of describing the same thing. It is a different arrangement of the room, and the awkwardness she felt was a real response to a real geometry that was never the true one.

You are not standing over anybody, and you were not standing over them on that doorstep four years ago. Proverbs 19:17 is where that sits, in a clause that names God as the one receiving, and the same Spirit who moved somebody to write it that way round is the one who gets a kind and paralyzed woman back out of her own house.

The awkwardness was not the sin, and it is not humility either

Let me name what has actually been happening for four years, because it is not what she thinks.

She believes she stopped out of respect. That she is being careful not to condescend, and that not helping is the more dignified option, and there is a version of that which is genuine and I want to honor it.

But look at the shape of the last four years. Nobody has been protected from anything. The families were not spared her awkwardness, because she was not there. The only thing that has been protected is her from the feeling.

That is not humility. Humility would have gone down the road again the following week with a worse sentence and let it be worse. What has been running is embarrassment, which is about her, and which she has been reading as consideration for other people because it wears the same coat.

And the awkwardness itself is not a sin. It is the natural condition of doing anything real for anybody. Everybody who has ever helped anybody has said a clumsy sentence on a doorstep, and the ones who kept going simply decided the sentence was cheaper than the absence.

You have permission to be graceless about this, and it is already given, and it does not have to be earned with better wording. He promised it, in the letter that says love covers a multitude of things (1 Peter 4:8), and His Spirit is not standing beside your doorstep grading your phrasing.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go on, this outranks everything above it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there will not be one.

And there is nothing anywhere on this page about money. Not your money, not anybody's, not this work's. Nobody here is asking for anything, no amount is going to be named, and if a page anywhere turns a verse like this one toward its own bank details, close it.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your husband is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is basic sense. None of it fails anything.

You have been fully inside this, and you were never at the edge of it because of what your body allows. Scripture settled that long before you got here (2 Corinthians 8:12), and the Spirit of God has never once been distributed by medical criteria.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.