The Woman Who Could Not Receive

Twenty years on that street, and the list of what she has done for it would take a while.

Rides to school every morning for a family who had no car for eighteen months. The keys to her house held by four households. A woman at number nine whose husband left, and who ate at her table three nights a week for most of a year and has never once been reminded of it. Two funerals catered. The thing with the boy at number fifteen, which nobody talks about and which she does not either.

In February she had the surgery. It went fine. She is fine.

And the street, which loves her and which has been waiting for years for something like this, mobilized in about four hours. There was a schedule. There was a spreadsheet on somebody's phone. There was a woman at her door on the second evening with a lasagna and a face full of gladness at finally being able to do something.

And she stood in the doorway and said, oh, that is so kind, but honestly I am fine, I have got things in.

She had not got things in. She had almost nothing in. She stood there and said it anyway, with the dish four inches from her hands, and the woman was gracious and took it home and they both said goodnight.

She thought about it that evening and every evening since, which is now about eleven weeks.

Here is what she has arrived at and cannot get past. It was not modesty. It was not wanting to spare anybody trouble, although she said that to herself for the first week. What actually happened in that doorway was something closer to a refusal, and she does not know what she was refusing.

She has a theory she does not like. The theory is that giving is a position and receiving is a different position, and she has been standing in the first one for twenty years, and she does not know how to be in the second one, and there is something in her that will not find out.

You will have your own doorway. The kindness held out four inches from your hands that you said no to before deciding anything.

The strangest sales call in the Bible

There is a passage in Isaiah that opens with a market cry, the kind a trader shouts, and then does something with it that no trader would.

Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.Isaiah 55:1

Read the instruction he gives to the person with nothing. It is not: come and be given. It is come, buy, addressed explicitly to somebody who has no money, and then, in case anybody thinks a discount is being offered, without money and without price.

That is a deliberate collision of words. He keeps the verb of buy and removes every condition of buy, and the effect is to leave a person with nothing standing in a market with a full right to the goods and no transaction available to them.

Which is precisely the doorway.

So take it plainly: you are addressed as somebody with nothing and told to come anyway, and that is what Isaiah 55 says in its own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a shout in a marketplace and lays it down on a front step with a covered dish in it.

And notice who the invitation is for. Not the generous. Not the ones with a twenty year record on that street. He who has no money. The qualification, if you can call it one, is emptiness, which is a category she has spent two decades ensuring she is never in.

Now the theory she does not like, which is right as far as it goes. Giving and receiving are indeed different positions. What she has missed is which one is foundational. In this passage, everybody in the market is there on the same terms, and the terms are that nobody paid. Her twenty years of giving did not buy her a place in the giving position. She was always in the other one, in the only market that finally matters, and she has been running a very good imitation of a merchant on the strength of it.

You have been in the receiving position the entire time, because the written word puts everybody at that stall on the same footing, and His Spirit is what makes that land on somebody eleven weeks into thinking about a lasagna.

What twenty years are not

Now the guardrail, and it needs both directions here.

The twenty years are not a debt anybody owes her, and they are not a credit with God either. There is no account. A crown in Scripture is placed on a head by somebody else, always, and in the one glimpse we get of people holding one, they take it off and throw it down.

And they are not a mistake. The rides to school happened. The woman at number nine ate. This article is not going to reframe twenty years of real love as a strategy for avoiding something, because that would be both cruel and inaccurate. A person can do a true thing for true reasons and also have built a wall out of it, and both are the case.

You have twenty real years that were never a buy, and Scripture is what holds both halves, and His Spirit is what stops the second half from erasing the first.

And nothing here is an instruction. Nobody is telling her to accept the next dish and have a breakthrough. You have nothing to demonstrate at your own front door, because the written word never makes receiving into a task, and His Spirit is what keeps a truth from becoming an assignment for a woman who is already very tired.