Open Thine Hand Wide

It was 2014 and it was about four hundred dollars and he found out in the following March that the story had not been true.

He is not going to tell it here, and honestly the details do not matter, and the man who did it had a hard enough life that a reasonable person can construct the reasons. He was angry for a couple of weeks. Then he was mostly embarrassed, which lasted longer, and then it settled into what it is now, which is nothing much at all.

He would tell you it does not bother him and that would be true.

What he would not tell you, because he has never noticed it, is that his hand closed that March and has not opened since.

Not dramatically. He gives. He gives to the church, he gives at work when the envelope goes round, and he is the first to put in for anything at his daughter's school. What changed is smaller and more specific: he now assesses. Somebody asks, or somebody does not ask but plainly needs, and there is a quiet process that runs before anything moves, and the process asks whether this one is genuine.

Eleven years of that process. It has never once been switched off, and he did not install it on purpose, and it runs on every single person who comes near him now.

If there is a process running in you that you did not install, come and sit down out here. Nobody is going to tell you that what happened did not happen.

God gives the command with the problem attached

Here is a sentence that is a great deal more honest than most of what gets preached off it.

For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land.Deuteronomy 15:11

Read the shape of that. The poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore.

God states the discouraging fact first and then hangs the command on it with the word therefore. He is not pretending the problem is solvable. He is not saying open your hand because your open hand will end poverty in Israel, and He is not offering any assurance that the money will always land well.

The permanence of the difficulty is given as the reason for the open hand rather than as an argument against it.

And notice the range again. Thy brother, thy poor, thy needy, in thy land. Four times a possessive. This is not a policy about the poor in general, it is about the specific people in the specific place where you happen to be standing, which means it is about people you can see and therefore about people who can disappoint you.

You are being commanded into a situation God has already described as permanent, and it was already known when the command was given. Deuteronomy 15:11 is where that sits, in a sentence that puts the discouraging clause before the therefore, and the same Spirit who moved Moses to write it that way round is the one who reaches a man who has been quietly assessing since 2014.

The process is not discernment, and it is worth knowing the difference

Now let me separate two things that feel identical from the inside, because he has been calling one of them by the other's name for eleven years.

Discernment is real, and it is good, and Scripture is full of it. It is specific, it is about a particular situation, it can be talked about out loud, and it produces different answers on different days. Sometimes discernment says no, and no is a legitimate answer, and a man who never says no to anybody is not generous, he is unable to make decisions.

The process he is running is not that. It has produced the same answer for eleven years. It runs before he has any information. It cannot be talked about out loud, because if he described it he would hear how it sounds, and most tellingly: it is not about the person in front of him at all. It is about a man in 2014.

That is what makes it a scar rather than a skill. A scar applies the last injury to everybody who comes near, indefinitely, without being asked to.

And a scar is not a moral failure. Nobody chooses one. He got taken advantage of and his hand closed, which is exactly what a hand does, and eleven years went by because nothing ever came along to open it.

You have a hand that closed for a reason, and it was already an injury rather than a decision. That sentence belongs to Psalm 147:3, where God is described as binding up wounds, and His Spirit does not treat an old bruise as though it were a character.

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 here.

And there is no appeal on this page. Nothing here is asking you for money, no amount is named anywhere, nobody is naming a cause or an organization, and this work will never once be mentioned as somewhere for your open hand to go. The whole of it is about the people on your own street and in your own family.

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

You are fully inside this, and you were never on its edge because of what your body allows. Scripture settled that long before you got here (2 Corinthians 8:12), and the Spirit of God is not apportioned 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.