They All Knew

Odette was not in the room when they took it, and she has spent eleven months trying to decide whether that made it better or worse.

It was handled beautifully. She wants that said and she means it without any edge at all. Somebody who loves her had a quiet word with somebody who is discreet, and it was raised without her name being said out loud, and the amount that came in covered the thing entirely and then a little.

She got a card. No signature, four words in it, and she still has that card.

And she has been walking into that building differently for eleven months.

Because they knew. Not by name, and not with details, and every single one of them was decent about it. But somebody stood up at the front and asked, and a room of about ninety people put something in, and any adult in that room can do arithmetic about who has not been quite right lately, and Odette has been in that church for nineteen years and is not a hard woman to notice.

She thinks about it in the car park. She thinks about it on the third song. She thinks about it when somebody is kind to her about something completely unrelated.

She has never said one word about it to anybody, and she has been in one conversation where she thinks the other woman was trying to say something and Odette changed the subject so fast that she felt it happen in her own mouth.

What got her was a Sunday in October. A woman she barely knows, about seventy, sat down next to her before the service with no preamble at all and said: I was helped in this church in 1994. Everybody knew. I could not come for four months, and then I came back, and it took two years for me to stop reading the room. I am telling you because nobody told me.

I am telling you because nobody told me.

Odette sat in a row of chairs with her coat still on and had to look straight ahead, and she could not have explained it to a single person in that congregation.

And the sentence that arrived, sitting there, had nothing to do with the money.

She thought: the need got covered in one Sunday, and the thing I have been carrying since is that I became visible, and somebody just sat down beside me who has been visible since 1994.

Say the word right, before anything else

I want to be plain about what wealth means on this site, because the word is slippery and I would rather be clear than clever with a woman sitting in a row with her coat still on.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not what came in on a Sunday, not a thing covered entirely and then a little. A portion is the old table word for what is set down in front of somebody because they belong at that table, and Scripture takes that ordinary word and does something outrageous with it: God says of certain people that He Himself is their portion. That is the only sense the word carries here.

And let me be plain about something else before we go a step further. Nothing on this page suggests you should have refused it, or that a stronger woman would have managed on her own, or that the help was a lesser kind of gift. That would be a cruel and stupid thing to say to somebody who was in genuine trouble. What that room did was a real answer to a real problem and it worked, and I am glad of it, and so is God.

What I want to do is narrower. I want to name what it did not cover, and I would rather the word of God named it, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed at it.

You are not outside this. The written word says it about you, and His Spirit is the one who makes an old line about somebody else read as a line about you.

Faces that are never made ashamed

David writes two lines in the thirty-fourth psalm about being in trouble, and the second one is about a face.

I sought the LORD, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears. Those who look to him are radiant, and their faces shall never be ashamed.Psalm 34:4-5

Notice that he separates the two things, and almost nobody does.

The first line is about deliverance. He asked and he was answered and the fear went. That is the transaction people usually talk about, and it is real.

Then the second line is about something else entirely. It is about what happens to a face. Radiant, he says, and then he adds the sentence that this article exists for: their faces shall never be ashamed.

He knows the difference between being helped and being able to look at people afterward. Whoever wrote that line had been through both, and he did not assume the first one produced the second one, because it does not.

You are not proud for the eleven months. You are somebody whose problem was solved in public and whose face has been managing a room ever since, and the written word does not scold anybody for that. It puts a whole clause aside for the face, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between reading a psalm and walking into a building without reading it.

And here is what is true of you today, before one thing about that congregation changes. You are met where the money could not reach. His word says their faces shall never be ashamed, and it says it as a settled outcome rather than as a hope, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a fact in a body rather than a line to be agreed with.

What the collection did not cover

Think about what got you in that row. It wasn't kindness. You have had eleven months of careful kindness.

It was: I am telling you because nobody told me. It was a woman of about seventy handing over her own 1994 without being asked, in a building where everybody has been extremely careful never to mention anything. You were starving to meet somebody who had been visible and survived it, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as self-pity, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a person and not merely about them.

That is the honest thing under the eleven months. The money problem is over. What is not over is that ninety people did arithmetic in a room, and no collection on earth could have covered that, which is not a failure of the collection.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. Being helped in public did not change your standing anywhere it matters. Jesus told a woman who had been very publicly caught to go and live her life, out loud, in front of everybody who had been holding the stones, and He was in that row of chairs before that woman sat down.