The Costly Thing Was Already Spent

The street closed at four and by six there was a table down the middle of it that had come out of eleven different houses, and Cherelle spent the first half hour of it doing sums.

She has three and the youngest is two and this month has been the month it has been.

She had not planned to come out. She came out because her middle one heard the sound system and there is no arguing with a seven year old and a sound system.

And she stood at the edge of it with the two year old on her hip, doing the arithmetic that anybody who has been short for a while will recognize.

If she eats she should have brought something. If she does not eat, the kids will, and then she has eaten nothing and everybody will notice and somebody will say something kind. If she takes a plate for the little one, that is one plate, and one plate is defensible. If she takes two plates, that is a family eating off other people's tables in front of the whole street.

Two plates. That was the number. She spent about twenty-five minutes on that.

And a woman called Bernice, who is about sixty and who ran the whole thing and who had, Cherelle later worked out, cooked for about ninety people on her own between one and five o'clock, came down the street with a serving spoon in her hand and said: "Are your children eating?"

Cherelle said yes, they were.

And Bernice said, "Then sit down, because I have been on my feet since one and I am not carrying a plate to somebody standing up."

She said afterwards that the thing that undid the sums was not the food. It was working out later what Bernice had already put in. Four hours in a kitchen in August with the windows shut. The cost of it was not on the table at all. It had already been paid, upstairs, before anybody arrived, and by the time the street sat down there was nothing left to contribute to.

You may be doing the same sums. Whatever your version is, and whether it is money or energy or capacity or nerve, this whole subject arrives and you immediately start working out what you cannot manage. And nobody has ever shown you which side of the arrangement has already spent something.

The Argument Runs From The Large Thing Down

There is a sentence in Romans that is built as a piece of reasoning, and if you follow the direction of the reasoning it settles the whole question of what anybody owes.

"He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?"Romans 8:32

Watch the direction. It starts with the largest and most expensive thing in the entire story and reasons downward from it to everything else.

The logic is: the costly part is done. Given that, what exactly would He now be withholding, and on what grounds, and out of what shortage?

You are standing on the far side of the expensive part rather than in front of it. Romans 8 argues from the great cost already spent to the small things freely given, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that reasoning and puts it in a closed street at six in the evening.

And notice the word in the second half. Freely give. The same word that runs through this whole category turns up again here, at the end of an argument about cost, which is exactly where you would expect it to be missing.

That is deliberate. The verse is not saying the arrangement was cheap. It is saying it was enormously expensive and that the expense was met on one side, and that the one side was not yours.

You were never the party that had anything to pay in this. That is what the written word says about the shape of the whole thing, and it is the Spirit of God who makes an argument about direction land in a woman doing sums with a two year old on her hip.

The Sums Have Nothing To Work On Here

Now let this page be what it is describing, because this is the strictest article on the site and it is written for one specific person.

Nothing here asks you for anything. No figure, no proportion, no percentage, no threshold, no practice you have been enrolled in, no sign-up sheet, no membership, no next step, and nothing routed to any person, cause, church or work anywhere at all, this one included.

There is no small amount hinted at. There is no suggestion about giving time in place of money. There is no gentle observation about what people in your circumstances often find they can manage. Read the rest of the page and check.

And this must be said too, because it is easy to get wrong: your situation is not being used here as an example of anything to anybody. You are not the illustration. You are the person this was written to, and those are not the same, and a page that quietly turns you into a lesson for somebody more comfortable has failed you.

You are not short of anything that is required here. It is written that the gift of God is not of works, lest any man should boast, which removes the mechanism rather than lowering the amount, and His Spirit is the one who has been standing at that table with you through every one of the twenty-five minutes.

And you are fully welcome tonight, with three children and this month behind you and nothing in your hands, because the expensive part of this was spent before you arrived at it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this page from putting a plate on a table with a number beside it.