When I Can Afford It

The envelope went round the office on a Thursday afternoon, for a woman on the second floor whose mother had died.

Everybody signed the card. Everybody put something in. And she stood at her desk with the envelope in her hand and did the thing she always does, which is a very fast, very quiet piece of mental arithmetic involving the date, the car insurance, and what is left, and she put in the smallest note in her purse and folded the flap and passed it on.

And then she sat down and felt hot at the back of her neck for about ten minutes.

Then she got annoyed at feeling hot, because who exactly is judging her. Nobody looked. Nobody counts. The woman on the second floor will never know and would not care if she did. So she went back to work and it went away, more or less, until about ten past nine that night, when it came back on the sofa in a quiet house.

Here is the thing underneath it, and she has never said it to a living person.

She has a plan. The plan has no date on it but it is completely real. When the car is paid off. When the youngest is out of childcare. When there is a month where nothing unexpected happens. Then she will be the kind of woman who gives properly. Then she will put the real note in the envelope. Then she will do the thing she has always meant to do, and she will do it generously, with both hands, the way it is meant to be done.

And what she noticed on the sofa, at ten past nine, is that she has been holding that plan for eleven years, and that in eleven years there has not been one single month where nothing unexpected happened, and that there is not going to be one.

You know that sofa. Yours might be a promise to yourself about the year after next. It might be a good thing you fully intend to start once things settle. And a part of you has begun to suspect that the settling is not a date, it is a horizon, and it moves at exactly the same speed you do.

Come in, take your shoes off, let me get you something. I want to give you one sentence from Paul, and it is going to make the whole waiting arrangement fall over.

There is no code, and there is a corner you already have

Let me say the plain thing first, because the name over this door promises a secret and I am not going to keep you sitting here hoping for one.

There is no code. There is nothing you can put in an envelope that unlocks anything. Nothing in Scripture ties what you give to what comes back to you, and if anybody has taught you otherwise I am not going to spend your evening arguing with them, because you did not come here for a fight, you came here tired. I will simply show you what is actually written and let it do its own work.

Paul is writing to a church about a collection for believers in another country who are in genuine hardship, and in the middle of it he says this.

For if there be first a willing mind, it is accepted according to that a man hath, and not according to that he hath not.2 Corinthians 8:12

Take that apart with me slowly, because it is doing three things at once.

First, the order. A willing mind comes first. Not an amount. The willingness is the thing that is present or absent, and everything else follows it.

Second, the measure. Accepted according to what a person has. Not according to what would be impressive. Not according to what somebody else put in. According to what is actually in the purse on that Thursday.

Third, and this is the one for you: and not according to that he hath not. God does not assess you against the woman you would be if the car were paid off. He does not hold your gift up against your imaginary future budget and find it thin. The version of you in eleven years' time is not the standard, and He has never once used her as one.

You are not being measured against a woman who does not exist, and what is in your hand today is the whole of what is being looked at. That is not a comfort I have arranged for a woman on a sofa at ten past nine. It is written into the eighth chapter of 2 Corinthians, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an apostle's sentence about a collection and lays it over a hot neck at an office desk.

You have a God who accepts what is actually there, and He has never once asked you for what you have not got. Scripture says according to that a man hath, and the Spirit is the one who takes that little phrase and lets a body stop bracing.

Now let me teach you the part that changes the shape of this, because comfort on its own will leave you exactly where you are.

The old harvest law never told the farmer to give a portion of his harvest. Not once. It told him where to stop cutting. Leave the corner standing. Do not go back for the sheaf you dropped. The whole field remains his, and the corner was simply never counted as his in the first place.

Do you see what that does to your plan? Your plan is waiting for a surplus, because a portion has to come out of something. A corner does not. A corner is not sized against what you have. It is an edge, and it exists in a lean year exactly as it exists in a full one. The farmer in a bad season still left a corner, and it was a smaller corner, and it was the same corner.

You are not short of what is needed to do this, and the edge does not scale with the account. Scripture puts the boundary at the side of the field rather than through the middle of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an old boundary and makes it usable in a month like this one.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because an eleven year old plan does not fall over because somebody explained it well. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what waiting never does. So say it out loud in your own front room. You have the standing to tell a plan of yours what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that your position and not your income, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word much further than a sofa in a quiet house.