What Shall I Bring

Yvette would tell you straight out that she has never once given anything expecting something back, and she would believe it, and she would be about eighty percent right.

It is the other twenty percent that has been keeping her awake.

Eight years. Eight years of the sort of thing nobody sees. She is the one who quietly covers a shortfall for a girl at church and never mentions it. She has taken in her cousin's two children twice, for months at a time, and cooked as if there were no difference between four and six. She drives an old woman to the clinic every second Wednesday and has never taken a penny for the petrol and would be offended if it were offered.

And underneath all of it, unspoken, never once put into a sentence, there was a quiet expectation about her own house.

Not wealth. She would want that said, and it is true. Just for the ceiling to be fixed. Just for the letters to stop. Just for one year where she is not the one calculating on the way to work.

In February her hours were cut.

She said nothing about it to anybody at church. She kept driving the old woman. She covered the shortfall for the girl again in March, which she could not really do, and did anyway.

And on a Sunday evening in April she was in her kitchen, and she stopped in the middle of putting a lid on something, and said out loud, to nobody at all: I have been carrying everybody for eight years. What exactly is it I have been bringing.

The shame came in behind it before she had finished the sentence, because Yvette has taught young women in that church that God is not a machine, and she meant every word of it.

She did not say a thing to a soul for six weeks.

What finally cracked her open was the old woman in the car, going to the clinic on a Wednesday, who has no idea about any of it. She was looking out of the window and she said, out of nowhere, not turning her head: you know I don't need this lift. My nephew would take me. I come because I like the drive with you.

I come because I like the drive with you.

Yvette drove the rest of the way with her jaw set so she would not go, and had to sit in the car park afterward for a while, and she could not have explained it to one person in that congregation.

And the sentence that arrived, sitting in that car, had nothing to do with her hours.

She thought: I have spent eight years bringing things, and somebody has just told me they came for the company.

Let me say the word properly

Before anything else I want to be plain about what wealth means on this site, because it is a slippery word and I would rather be clear than clever with a woman sitting in a clinic car park.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a return, not what is owed. 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 it is not a smaller helping given to the people whose circumstances did not shift.

And let me be as plain the other way. Money is not wicked, wanting the ceiling fixed is not greed, and eight years of covering other people is not something anybody should be examined for. Nothing on this page ties what God does to what you have or to what you give. Let me say that one twice, because this is the article where it matters most: nothing you have given has ever been a lever, and nothing you give will ever be one, and this site will never suggest otherwise in any form, however softened.

If you are genuinely short, and it sounds as though you are, if there is a date and a figure and a knot in your stomach, that is real and it deserves a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that, and the Holy Spirit is not embarrassed by any part of that sentence.

And whoever gave you the idea that the two things are connected, and somebody did, in a broadcast or a saying or a whole atmosphere, is not on trial here. I do not know their name and I would not use it. What I want to look at is the expectation, and I would rather the word of God did the looking, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed.

He answered the question before anybody could raise the price

Micah puts the question in the mouth of somebody who is escalating, and the escalation is the point.

With what shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?Micah 6:6-8

Watch what the questioner is doing. He starts high and he keeps going higher. He is bidding. He is a sincere person trying to work out the price, and there is no mockery in the text for him at all.

And the answer, when it comes, does not name a price. It changes the category. Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with your God. Not one of those is a transfer. Every one of them is a way of being with somebody.

You are not a mercenary woman. You are somebody who has been genuinely generous for eight years and who also, being human, and under real pressure, has been quietly bidding. The written word does not shame the man in Micah for bidding, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a woman hear that in a car park as relief instead of as exposure.

And here is what costs something to say. If God had ever been taking bids, you would have every right to your complaint in that kitchen. The reason the complaint has nowhere to go is not that you gave badly or gave with the wrong heart. It is that He was never running an exchange. He asked you to walk with Him, and He has been walking beside you through every single one of those eight years, including February.

What the eight years were actually doing

You are walking with Him right now, in that car, before one thing about your hours or the ceiling or the letters changes. His word says what He requires is to walk humbly with your God, present tense, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a fact in a body rather than a phrase in a book.

Think about what actually broke you open. It wasn't the hours. You'd survived worse than the hours.

It was an old woman looking out of a window saying I come because I like the drive with you. It was the discovery that in the one relationship where you were certain you were the one supplying something, somebody had come for you and not for the lift. You were starving to be wanted for the company. You still are, and there is nothing grasping about it.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. Every shortfall you covered was seen. Every second Wednesday was seen. Not one of them was a payment and not one of them was wasted, and both are true at the same time. Jesus watched a widow put in the smallest amount in the building and said out loud that she had put in more than everybody, which tells you He is not adding up totals, and He has been in that car every second Wednesday for eight years.