The Tally That Was Never About Money

It is written in pencil in the back of an address book that she has not used as an address book since about the time people stopped writing addresses down.

Nothing large. That is worth saying at the start, because it changes what this is. Twenty here. Thirty for the thing with the car. Once, a long time ago, a bigger one, when she was twenty six and had less than he did. Some entries have a month next to them. Some just say Dad and a figure, in a hand that gets younger the further down the page you go.

Thirty one years of it.

He is eighty now and he lives on his own and she goes over on Thursdays. He is funny. He is genuinely funny, and he is kind to the woman upstairs, and he still puts a shirt on to go to the shop.

And she keeps the book.

She has taken it out perhaps twice a year for thirty one years. She does not add it up. That is the strange part. She has never once totaled the page, and if you asked her what it comes to she could not tell you within a hundred either way. What she does is read it. Down the page, slowly, the way you would read a diary, and then she closes it and puts it back in the drawer with the batteries and the guarantee for a fridge she no longer owns.

She has never mentioned a single entry to him.

And once, this year, sitting with the book open on her knee, she said out loud into an empty room: what is this a list of.

You know that drawer. Yours might be a folder of screenshots, or a set of dates you can recite, or simply a running total you keep in your head about somebody who never asks how you are. The amounts might be so small that saying them out loud would embarrass you. That does not make the tally smaller. It usually means the tally was never about the amounts.

Come and sit by the window. I want to show you an old law that is really about a boundary, and then I want to say the true thing to you gently.

There is no code, and there is a line that keeps help from becoming a hold

Let me say the plain thing first, because the name over the door of this site promises a secret and I would rather you closed the tab than sat here waiting for one.

There is no code. There is nothing in Scripture that gets thirty one years of twenties back, and nothing in this message is a way of extracting anything from an eighty year old man. If letting go were a technique for producing repayment, it would not be letting go at all, it would be patience with a hook in it, and God has never once dealt with anybody like that.

Here is the law, and I want you to notice what it is protecting.

And if thy brother be waxen poor, and fallen in decay with thee; then thou shalt relieve him: yea, though he be a stranger, or a sojourner; that he may live with thee. Take thou no usury of him, or increase: but fear thy God; that thy brother may live with thee. Thou shalt not give him thy money upon usury, nor lend him thy victuals for increase.Leviticus 25:35-37

Read what the prohibition is actually for. It is not economic policy. Look at the phrase that appears twice: that he may live with thee. Both times. The reason no increase may be taken is so the relationship survives the help.

God knew exactly what money does between two people who love each other. He knew that the moment help starts accumulating, it stops being help and becomes a position, and that the one who gave ends up above the one who received, permanently, quietly, without a word ever being said. So He put a line around it. Relieve him, and take nothing on top, so that he can go on living beside you as your brother rather than beneath you as your debtor.

Your book has been taking increase. Not money. But something has been accruing in the back of that address book for thirty one years, and it has been quietly deciding what he is to you.

You were never asked to keep an account of the people you have helped, and the increase was the one thing forbidden. That is not a gentle idea I have arranged at a window. It is written into Leviticus 25 twice in three verses, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an ancient boundary and lays it across a page written in pencil.

You have a God who protected the relationship rather than the money, and He has never once counted what He has given you. Scripture says He gives to all liberally and upbraideth not, which means He does not bring it up afterwards, and His Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and makes it warm rather than merely correct.

Now let me say the true thing, since we are sitting quietly.

You never added it up because it was never a debt. It is a record. Every entry is a small proof that you were the one who could, and he was the one who could not, and that the order of things between you turned over at some point when you were still young enough to find it frightening.

You were twenty six and you had less than he did and you gave him the bigger one anyway, and something in you has never been the same since. The book is where you have kept that. Not out of resentment. Out of grief, and out of a kind of loyalty, because as long as it is written down it is real, and if you throw the book away then nobody in the world knows what you carried and when it changed hands.

You are not keeping score, and thirty one years of quietness about it is not coldness. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a word like nigh and makes it a chair pulled up beside a woman with a book on her knee.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because a book like that does not close because a friend was kind at a window. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what quiet keeping never does. So say it out loud, in your own house. You have the standing to speak to a record you have kept and tell it what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that your position rather than your loyalty, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word much further than a front room.