I Will Give It But I Will Not Lend It

She is famous on that road for it.

Somebody asks for anything and it is out of the house in ninety seconds and they are being told, firmly and warmly and with the door already closing: keep it. Honestly. I do not need it back.

She has given away a stepladder, a slow cooker, a strimmer, more coats than she can count, a sewing machine, three bicycles and a set of good saucepans that were a wedding present.

Everybody says she is the most generous woman on the street and they are not wrong exactly.

Here is what she worked out in April, and it arrived in the middle of doing something else, which is how these things arrive.

Keep it ends the conversation.

If you keep it, that is finished. You do not come back. There is no Thursday where you knock and I have to open the door and stand there while you tell me how it went, and there is no gap in between where you have a thing of mine and I have to think about you.

Lend has a second half in it. Keep it does not.

She sat with that for a while, because she has spent fifteen years being praised for the exact behavior by which she has kept an entire street at arm's length, and both of those are true at once, and nobody on that road would ever guess.

Give to him that asketh, and turn not away from him that would borrow

Sit down in the hall a minute, because there is a line in the Sermon on the Mount that names two different things in the same breath, and you have only ever done the first, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has brought you to look at the second.

Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.Matthew 5:42

Two clauses. Give to him that asketh. And: from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.

If giving covered it, the second clause would not be there. It is there because borrowing is a different act with a different shape, and the shape is the part you have been avoiding: borrowing has a return in it, and a return means the person comes back, and coming back means a second conversation you did not schedule.

Hear this in your own hallway. You are not a fraud, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture puts giving and lending side by side as two real things rather than one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has had that door open in ninety seconds for fifteen years.

Now let me name what keep it is doing, carefully, because you have been praised for it for a decade and a half and a careless word here would be cruel and untrue.

Everything you have given was genuinely given. Nobody was tricked. The saucepans are gone and the woman who has them thinks of you every time she cooks. That is written into every one of those years, and the Holy Spirit was in the giving of all of it.

And the giving also cost you the thing and saved you the person, and it is the second half of that sentence that came up in April.

You know exactly what a doorstep conversation costs you. You have known since you were young, and you have never told anybody, and giving things away outright is the most respectable method of avoiding one that has ever been invented.

Hear this too, and let it land in the passage. You are not a cold woman pretending to be warm, and Scripture is what says so. What is written asks you not to turn away from the one who would borrow, which is a sentence about staying in the room, and the Spirit of God has been keeping you in that doorway for fifteen years already.

And let me be plain, because this subject gets ruined by people with an interest in ruining it. Nobody here wants your saucepans, or your ladder, or anything else. This site is not asking you for a thing and no church has a claim on the contents of your house, and if anybody teaching you anything ever suggests otherwise you may stop listening to them entirely. Everything in this article moves in one direction and it is out of your hands and back into them.