Handfuls on Purpose

There used to be a way it went, and everybody on that road knew it without anybody explaining it.

He came up the path with the crates, and he stopped at the third house and left some, and at the house with the blue door, and at the one where the old man sits out in all weathers. Then home. It was not charity and nobody called it anything. It was how a catch got divided, and it was how his father did it, and his father's father, and the whole road ran on it in both directions, because the man with the blue door fixed engines and the old man's daughter drove people to appointments.

Then last year happened. The boat went in for work that could not wait. The prices went where they went. Two months came where he was doing sums he had not done since he was young.

And one Thursday he came up the path with a good crate and did not stop at the third house.

He told himself it was that day. That day only, because of the thing with the boat. Nobody said anything. Nobody would ever say anything, which is the trouble with a road like that.

His nephew was with him about a month later, thirteen years old and carrying the second crate, and at the top of the path the boy said, are we not taking any down. And he said, not today. Just that. Not today, in a voice he did not recognize, and the boy said all right and carried the crate the rest of the way, and neither of them has mentioned it since.

That was in the spring. He has not stopped at a single house since the spring.

You know that path. Yours may be a habit of picking up the bill that quietly ended. It may be a thing you used to do for a neighbor and no longer do. It may be nothing anybody could name, just a general drawing in that started in a hard year and did not leave when the year did. And underneath it there is a sentence you have never said out loud: I used to be somebody who shared, and I am not sure when I stopped.

Sit down on the wall by the boat a minute. Let me name the thing properly before I say anything that lifts.

There is no code, and there are handfuls dropped on purpose

Let me say the plain thing first, because the name over the door of this site promises a secret and a man already doing sums does not need one more thing dangled at him.

There is no code. Nothing you do with a crate unlocks anything. There is no arrangement of Scripture that makes a hard year go easier, and if there were, it would make God a man with a switch behind His back who watched you do those sums and did not throw it. I do not believe in that God and neither, underneath everything, do you.

And I am not going to skip past the hard part. Last year was real. The boat was real. Nobody who has not done those sums gets to be quick with a man who has.

So let me put the true thing beside something older.

There is a field in the book of Ruth, and a woman gleaning in it who is a foreigner and a widow, which in that world is the bottom of every list there is. And the man who owns the field gives an instruction to his workers that I have never got over.

And when she was risen up to glean, Boaz commanded his young men, saying, Let her glean even among the sheaves, and reproach her not: And let fall also some of the handfuls of purpose for her, and leave them, that she may glean them, and rebuke her not.Ruth 2:15-16

Look at what he actually organizes. Not a handout. He does not call her over and give her a sack, because that would put her in front of him with her hands out and everybody watching. He tells his men to drop some. On purpose. As if by accident. And then he says the thing twice, in two verses, in slightly different words: do not reproach her, do not rebuke her.

So the giving is hidden inside the ordinary work of the day, and the receiving costs her nothing in front of anybody, and the whole arrangement is built so that a woman at the bottom of every list can eat with her dignity intact.

You were never asked to bring the whole of it home, and some of what passes through your hands was never counted as yours. That is not a soft thing I am saying on a wall by a boat. It is written into the second chapter of Ruth, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an instruction given to farm workers and lays it across a path and three houses.

You have a God who measures your table, and the measuring was never handed to you. Scripture says He gives to all life and breath and all things, and His Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and eases a grip that closed in a hard spring.

Now let me name the wound, because I am not going to lift you over it.

It is not the sharing you miss. It is who you were on that path. There was a version of you that came up from the boat and stopped at three houses, and he was not generous, he was just a man in a road that worked, and you liked being him. And the thing you heard in your own voice when you said not today to a thirteen year old was that man going quiet. That is what has been sitting on you since the spring. Not stinginess. Grief.

You are not a mean man, and nothing about last year was a judgement on you. Scripture never once rebukes the one who is counting because he has to, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can open a hand without ever telling it it was wrong to close.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because a road does not change because a man sat on a wall and felt bad. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what quiet enduring never does. So speak it out loud where the water can hear it. You have the standing to speak to a hard season and tell it what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that yours by position rather than by season, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word further out than the reef.