They Brought Too Much

Manu has covered nine things in fourteen months and he could not tell you the total and he has never once been asked to.

That is the shape of it. Somebody's van. Somebody's flight home when there was a funeral. Two lots of school things in September. A cooker. A month of a rent when a hall closed and a family lost the income from it. The funeral itself, most of it, quietly, through somebody else so that nobody would know.

None of it was extravagant. Every single one of them was somebody in genuine trouble in a community of about four hundred people where everybody knows everybody, and Manu was in a position to and so he did.

He would tell you it is not a big deal, and by the standards of what those families were facing, it was not.

What he has not told anybody is that in February he covered something he could not cover, and moved money he should not have moved, and has spent since then quietly repairing it, and that when the tenth thing comes, and it will, he already knows what he is going to do.

Because there is no version of Manu that says no. That is the actual situation. It is not that he is generous, or not only. It is that the word does not exist for him in that context, and he has never once heard anybody else say it to him either.

Nobody in that community has ever said: brother, you have done enough. Stop.

Why would they. He is fine. He looks fine. He is the one who is fine.

What got him was an old woman at a funeral, not even the one he paid for, who has known him since he was a boy. She was sitting down and he was standing, as usual, and she took hold of his sleeve, which people of that generation do, and said: sit down next to me. Not to help. Sit down because I am telling you to sit down. Somebody has to tell you.

Somebody has to tell you.

Manu sat down on a plastic chair next to a woman of ninety and found that his throat had gone, and he could not have explained it to a single person in that hall.

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

He thought: I have been waiting fourteen months for somebody to say stop, and I did not know that was what I was waiting for.

Let me say the word plainly first

Before we go on I want to be plain about what wealth means on this site, because the word is slippery and I would rather be understood than admired.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a position, not being the one who is fine. 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 startling with it: God says of certain people that He Himself is their portion. That is the only sense the word carries here.

And now the paragraph that matters most, said plainly. There is no ask on this page. Nothing here suggests you give anything to anybody, there is no link and no cause anywhere in it, and this site will never once tell you that generosity produces a return, in any form, however carefully it is put. That wire does not exist here and it never will. You covered nine things in fourteen months. That is between you and those families and God, and this article has one interest in it: the fact that nobody has ever told you to stop.

That is the whole job. Not to grade what you did, and not to ask you for a tenth. To sit down on the plastic chair beside you, and I would rather the word of God sat there, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed.

You have been inside this the whole time. Scripture says so, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that more than information.

The one time God told people to stop

There is a paragraph in Exodus that is unlike anything else in the Bible, and hardly anybody preaches it, and the Holy Spirit has been keeping it for people exactly like you.

The people bring much more than enough for doing the work that the LORD has commanded us to do. So Moses gave command, and word was proclaimed throughout the camp, Let no man or woman do anything more for the contribution for the sanctuary. So the people were restrained from bringing, for the material they had was sufficient to do all the work, and more.Exodus 36:5-7

Read what actually happens there. A command is proclaimed through a whole camp, formally, publicly, and the command is: stop bringing.

They were not scolded. Nobody suggested their hearts were wrong. The word used is that they were restrained, which is a word for holding somebody back from something they were straining toward, and that is exactly the right word for a man who has already decided what he will do about the tenth thing.

And notice who did it. It did not occur to any of those people to stop. Somebody with authority had to say it out loud, in the camp, to everybody, because a person in full flow cannot see the edge of what they are doing.

You are not a soft man for the sleeve on your arm. You are somebody who has been in full flow for fourteen months in a community where nobody has any reason to stop you, and the written word does not scold anybody for that. It sends a man through a camp to say enough, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between reading that and being able to sit down.

And here is what is true of you tonight, before one thing about February is repaired. You are provided for and your hands are open, and an open hand is allowed to close for a season without becoming a fist. His word says the material was sufficient, present tense in that camp, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a settled thing in a body rather than an unusual passage.

What the fourteen months was doing

Think about what got you on that chair. It wasn't the kindness. That community is kind to you constantly.

It was: sit down because I am telling you to, somebody has to tell you. It was the only sentence nobody had said in fourteen months, said by somebody old enough to say it. You were starving to be restrained, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as weakness, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a man and not merely about him.

That is the honest thing under the nine things. It is not that you love those families too much. It is that a man who is always the one who is fine will keep going until somebody with standing tells him he has done enough, and in a community where he is the one who is fine, nobody ever will.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. Stopping is not a failure of love and it never has been. Jesus repeatedly left crowds who still had needs in them and went across the water, and nobody has ever suggested He loved them less on the far shore, and He was in that hall before that woman took hold of your sleeve.