I Have Almost Nothing To Hold

Four articles this year about holding things loosely, and every one of them slid off her.

She read them properly. She is not dismissive and she was not looking for a reason to be annoyed. The first one was about a shed. The second one was about a spare room. The third had a paragraph about lending your car.

She has one room. A kettle, a folding chair, a bed, a charger, a coat, a saucepan, and a plastic box under the bed with everything else in it.

By the fourth one she had stopped reading at the second paragraph and put her phone face down on the table, and the feeling was not envy.

It was: this is not for me.

Not with any drama. She is not a self pitying person and she has been on her own for a long time and she gets on with things. It was quieter than that. It was the feeling of walking past a shop you are not going into.

And underneath it there was a smaller thing that she noticed later, in the evening, doing the washing up in the same room.

She has been quietly excused. From all of it. Generosity is for people with sheds, and she is outside the whole subject, and there is a relief in that which she does not like at all.

Such as I have give I thee

Sit down on the folding chair a minute, because there is a sentence in Acts spoken by a man at a gate with nothing on him, and it is one of the most useful sentences in the whole book.

A man who cannot walk is at the temple gate, asking. Peter and John have nothing to hand him.

Then Peter said, Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and walk.Acts 3:6

Watch the shape of it, because the shape is the whole thing.

He names the lack in five words. Silver and gold have I none. No apology, no explanation, no long preamble about circumstances, and no request for anybody to feel sorry about it. Five words, and it is stated, and it is true, and it is finished.

And then, in the same breath, without a pause: but such as I have give I thee.

Hear this in your own room. You are not outside this subject, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture puts the man with nothing in his pocket at the center of the scene rather than at the edge of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept you reading four articles this year that all seemed to be about somebody else's shed.

Now let me say the thing about the four articles, because they were not wrong and you were not wrong either.

They were written to a real reader with a real problem, and the reader who labels his tools and the reader who keeps a room shut both exist and both needed a word. Nobody was showing off.

But a subject can be described so consistently in one register that everybody outside the register concludes they are exempt, and exempt sounds kind and is not, because what it actually means is left out.

Hear this too, and let it land at the table. You have not been let off anything, and Scripture is what says so. What is written has a man say silver and gold have I none and then hand over what he does have in the very same sentence, and the Spirit of God has never once measured a person by the size of what passes through their hands.

And now what is actually in the room, because you have been counting it as nothing and it is not nothing.

A kettle. A charger. A folding chair. A saucepan. An afternoon. A phone with credit on it. A washing machine downstairs that takes a card, and forty minutes while it runs.

Somebody within two hundred yards of you needs one of those this week. Not a shed. A charger, for a night, because theirs has gone. The folding chair, because there are three of them and two chairs. Forty minutes.

That is not a consolation prize and this article is not going to insult you by dressing it up as one. It is the same act. The tools reader has to get past his marker pen to do it, and you have to get past a sentence that says this conversation is not about me, and the sentence is the harder of the two.