The folding chairs make a ring in the church hall and the overhead lights hum like something patient. On the far wall a paper map of the world is taped up slightly crooked, and it is full of pins, red ones for the closed places and blue ones for the places where somebody in this room has a cousin. It is nine minutes past eight on a Tuesday. A woman in a gray cardigan is on her knees with her forehead almost touching the carpet, praying for a country whose name she taught herself to pronounce three winters ago. She prays for its prisons. She prays for a translator she has never met and never will. Around the fortieth minute her voice goes rough at the edges the way it always does, and somebody rests a hand between her shoulder blades, and the coffee urn ticks as it cools. When she finally says amen the room says it back to her like a door closing softly on something holy.
Wednesday afternoon, twenty minutes to five. The grocery store parking lot, sun coming in low and gold across the asphalt, every cart and every car dragging a long blue shadow behind it.
Two rows over, a woman is fighting a cart with a bad wheel. The front left one shudders, locks, then skates sideways, and the whole cart swings like it has opinions. A gallon of milk goes over on its side in the basket. There is a toddler in the child seat with one shoe on and one shoe somewhere else entirely. The woman hauls the cart straight, gets four feet out of it, feels it go crooked again, and stops. She puts both hands flat on the handle and stands there breathing with her hair in her face.
The woman in the gray cardigan is four parking spaces away with her keys already in her hand. She sees the whole thing. She has somewhere to be at five. She looks up at the sky doing its gold trick, and something in her chest goes soft, and she thinks, oh, that poor thing, and she opens her door and sets her purse on the passenger seat.
She prays for her at the traffic light. Honestly. Warmly. By no name, because she does not have one. Then the light turns green and the evening carries on and nothing at all is wrong, except that a woman two rows over got the cart home by herself with one hand on a child and one on a wheel that would not turn, and the person nearest to her in all the world at that moment was praying.
You know the shape of that. You have prayed for a continent and stepped around a person. Nobody catches you at it. There is nobody on earth who would ever accuse you of it, because everything you did was good and warm and real and heaven heard it. And still there is a small quiet place in you that has started to wonder whether all that reach has become a way of never being near.
Forty Feet Is Not A Small Distance
You are standing nearer to a real need than you have any idea. That is not a compliment I invented to warm you up. Galatians 6:10 hangs the whole matter on opportunity rather than on scale, and the Spirit is what carries a sentence like that off a page and lays it down over a shuddering wheel forty feet from your car door.
As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith.Galatians 6:10
Read what it actually says, because most of us have been reading a slightly different verse for years. Not as we have capacity. Not as we have a burden for it. Not as we have margin, or training, or a free evening, or a heart that has finally softened enough to feel the right thing. As we have opportunity. Which is to say: as it comes within reach.
That one word moves the whole subject. It takes mercy off the shelf marked ministry and sets it down on the asphalt where you are already standing with your keys in your hand.
And mercy is not forgiveness. People fold the two together and then wonder why nothing in their week ever changes. Forgiveness releases a debt that is owed to you. Mercy meets a need that is in front of you, and it does not stop at the door to ask whether the person deserves it, whether they can pay it back, or whether they are the reason the mess exists at all. Mercy is a thing hands do. It has a size, and the size is usually small, and the smallness is not a failure of love. Small is the actual shape of the thing. The Samaritan poured oil on a stranger, paid for a room, and then got back on his road, and Jesus said go and do likewise without adding one word about the man's recovery.
You have been given a reach, and it is exactly as long as your arms. That is Scripture, not sentiment, and the Spirit is what makes it move: it is written that we do good to all as we have opportunity, which is how a bad wheel and a tired woman and a child with one shoe stop being scenery and start being the near thing.
Prayer Was Never A Place To Set Somebody Down
She prayed at that light and the prayer was real. Do not let anybody take that from you, because a woman who spends forty minutes on her knees for prisons she has never seen is no hypocrite, and the pins in that map are not decoration. Every one of those prayers landed somewhere.
The trouble was never the prayer. The trouble is what prayer had quietly turned into for her: a place to set a need down so she could be finished with it. Something moved in her chest, and the something felt exactly like compassion, and she let the feeling stand in for the act. That is the substitution. It is so ordinary that almost nobody notices it happening, least of all the person doing it.
Feeling is not mercy. Feeling is only the thing that tells you where the mercy goes.
You are being taught to see the near one, and the teaching is already underway in you. The Spirit put that hunger in you long before you found it in a paragraph, and it stands written into Galatians 6:10 in plain words: as we have opportunity, do good.
Distance is the great comfort of religious people, and I say that with love, because I have needed the comfort myself. A country on a map cannot ask you for anything at eight o'clock on a Tuesday. It cannot follow up. It cannot need you again next week with the same problem in the same voice. You can love it enormously and at no cost at all to your Wednesday. But a woman two rows over can look you in the eye, and that is the whole difference, and your body knows it long before your theology does.
You are holding something today that is the right size for the person nearest you. No sentence of mine could set that size. His word does, at opportunity and nowhere else, and His Spirit is what fits the small thing to the real need so neither one goes to waste.
Here is the turn, and it is not a scolding, because a scolding has never once produced mercy in a human being.
You have been met by a mercy that came the whole distance to you. Christ did not consider you from a comfortable seat and feel something warm about it. His word says that while we were still without strength, in due time, He died for the ungodly, and it is that same Spirit living in you now. So the mercy in your hands was never something you generate on a good day. It is something that arrived.
That changes what tomorrow is. You are not being asked to become a warmer person first, or to work up a feeling before your body is allowed to move. The feeling can come along later or never; it was never the engine. You have been supplied already, out of a fullness that is not yours. Freely we received, freely we give: that is His word, and His Spirit keeps the giving from ever running the tank dry.
And if today is a day when you have nothing, hear this plainly and then let it go: there is no bill here. Mercy has a size and the size is allowed to be small, and on some days the size is nothing at all, and you are not accused for it. You are received on a day you help nobody. Scripture calls Him the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort, and His Spirit does that comforting Himself, without ever invoicing you for the visit.
You are free to do one small thing and then go home. The word puts the whole standard at opportunity, and opportunity has edges. The Spirit hands you a moment to fill, never a person to fix, and He has never once asked you to guarantee how somebody else's life turns out.
Declare this over yourself
- Cart with the bad wheel in my parking lot, you are the near thing, and near things are mine to reach. Scripture gives me one word for this and the word is opportunity. I see you, and my hands are free.
- Whisper that I am all reach and no hands, you are finished here. In the name of Jesus I put you out, and the word stands where you were standing: as we have opportunity, we do good. My hands are open now, and they are open to whoever is nearest.
- Lord Jesus, You came the whole distance to me and never once called it an inconvenience. Your word puts mercy inside my reach and Your Spirit points at the one in front of me, and I am going where You point. I am Yours, and my hands are Yours, starting in my own parking lot.
Galatians 6:10
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