The Door At The Back Of The Restaurant

Quarter past nine, and the extractor fan over the range is still roaring even though the last plate went out forty minutes ago. Tomas has the back door propped with the same brick he has used for eleven years. The alley smells like rain coming and hot metal and the lemons in the crate by the wall.

There is a pot on the back burner with maybe twelve portions still in it. Lentil, with the good stock, the one they run on Thursdays. It goes in the bin at ten. It always goes in the bin at ten, and it has always felt slightly criminal, and Tomas has stopped noticing that it does.

At the bottom of the three concrete steps there is a man standing with his hands at his sides.

He is not asking for anything. That is the thing that will stay with Tomas afterward. He has not come up the steps and he has not said a word and he is not doing the face that people do when they want something. He is just standing at the bottom of the steps in the last of the light, the way a man stands when he has run out of places to be at nine fifteen at night.

Tomas knows him.

Tomas knows the whole of it. Not the version that goes around the street, edited and thickened up by whoever tells it. He was there for part of it. He sat in a kitchen not far from here while some of it was happening, and he heard it from people who had no reason to make anything up, and there is no telling of this story where somebody explains it to him and he learns one new fact. His opinion is not a rumor. It is not a prejudice. It is the settled conclusion of a man who was in the room.

And it goes like this: he did that. Nobody did it to him. He did that.

So Tomas stands in the doorway with a ladle in his hand and the fan roaring behind him, and he feels the whole weight of being right come down on him like a coat, and it is a comfortable coat, and it has been keeping him warm for a long time.

The pot is going in the bin at ten.

The man at the bottom of the steps looks at the wall.

You are standing in a doorway somewhere with a ladle in your hand. Not this one. Yours has different steps and a different smell and a different man at the bottom of them, and the thing you know about him is true, and you did not make it up, and nobody had to talk you into it. And every single time this comes up, somebody wants you to reconsider what you know, and you are not going to, and honestly you should not have to.

Mercy Does Not Wait For The Verdict To Come In

I am not going to ask you to reopen the case. Let me put that down first and let it stay down for the whole article. This is not a page about whether you are right about him. You may well be exactly right, and if you are, nothing here disturbs that by a single inch, and I am not going to insult you by arguing a case I know nothing about from a great distance.

Here is what this page is about instead. There is a pot, and there is a bin, and there is ten o'clock.

You are being handed a standard that was never set at that man's height. Luke 6:36 puts the measure entirely on God's side of the sentence: be merciful, even as your Father is merciful. Not as he deserves. Not as the facts warrant. As your Father is. The Holy Spirit is what makes a standard set that high livable in a kitchen at closing time.

"Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful."Luke 6:36

Read the verse before it if you want to know how serious He is being. One sentence earlier He says the Most High is kind to the ungrateful and to the evil. Those are His two words, not mine, and He puts them there deliberately, because He is describing kindness that arrives without a finding of fact and He wants nobody confused about it.

You have a settled opinion and a full pot, and only one of those two is being asked for tonight. The Spirit does not pry a man's conclusions out of his hands before He moves them. Scripture never once makes a change of mind the price of a bowl of soup, and the same passage in Luke 6 has God being kind to people while they are still ungrateful and still what He called them.

That is worth sitting with, because it is the release. Nobody is asking you to announce anything. Nobody is asking you to say you were wrong, or that it was not as bad as you thought, or that there were two sides. The mercy goes out of the door and the question stays exactly where it is.

You were never appointed to the bench in this matter, and being right is not the same as being the judge. That is written into James 4:12, not offered as a mood, and the Spirit is well able to keep a man's hands working while the gavel stays in somebody else's fist.

Like Your Father, Not Like A Judge

There are two jobs available in that doorway and only one of them has your name on it.

You have been told to be like your Father, not to be like a court. Nobody has to take that from me. Luke 6:36 says even as, which is a comparison to a Person and not to a case file, and the Spirit works that likeness into a man over years, usually starting with his hands and getting to his opinions a long time later.

Notice the order there, because it is the opposite of the order we assume. We think the heart changes and then the hands follow. In practice, with a man who has been right about something for a long time, the hands go first and the heart comes along behind at its own speed, embarrassed, several months late.

So let the hands go.

You are holding the thing that a merciful man holds, which is a ladle and not a scale. No sentence of mine could reassign those. Scripture does, where the Lord tells us the measure we use is the measure that comes back to us, and His Spirit is what puts a serving spoon in a hand that has been holding something heavier.

And I will say the thing this category exists for, plainly. This article contains no verdict about the man at the bottom of the steps. I am not arguing that he is innocent. I am not confirming that he is guilty. He is a man, and God knows the whole of him and I know none of him, and I refuse to hand you a finding in either direction, because the moment I do, the soup becomes a statement instead of a supper.

You have been given permission to move before you feel one degree differently about anybody. It is written down, in Second Corinthians 9:7, that God loves a cheerful giver, and cheerfulness there is about the willingness in a hand and never about a warmth you have to manufacture first, and the same Spirit who put that line in a letter has never yet asked a man to fake a feeling as the entry fee.