The Man At The Photocopier

The corridor on the third floor gets the good light at half past four. It comes in low through the west windows, runs flat along the carpet tiles, and turns the whole hallway the color of weak tea. Somebody's radio is going in the kitchen. The building is emptying out.

Ray is at the big copier with a forty page contract and nothing much on his mind. Collate, staple, the warm paper smell. It is a good machine and it does not need him.

At the small copier, six feet away, Dennis from the second floor is feeding one sheet at a time into a machine that keeps spitting it back. He has been at it four minutes. Ray has been counting without meaning to.

The thing is, Dennis is not really copying anything. He has run the same page three times. He stands there with his palm flat on the lid, breathing the particular way a man breathes when he has decided not to make a sound, and his glasses keep going up onto his head and coming back down. Everybody on the third floor knows roughly what is happening at his house. Nobody knows the shape of it.

Ray knows exactly what he is going to do. His forty pages, the elevator, the drive.

Because here is what Ray believes, and he has never once said it out loud. Mercy is a thing people in uniforms do. Nurses do mercy. The woman who runs the pantry at church does mercy. There are people whose whole lives are set up for it, and Ray sells commercial insurance and is fifty-one and has a copier full of contract.

Six feet. That is the distance. It would take four steps and one sentence, and the sentence does not even have to be a good one.

The copier finishes. Ray gathers the warm stack, squares it twice on top of the machine because squaring it feels like something to do with his hands, and walks the other way down the corridor, into the good light, past the man he did not speak to.

You know that corridor. Maybe yours is a driveway, or a break room, or a doorway you drive past on the way to the store. You have stood a few feet from somebody coming quietly apart, and you thought, with real humility and complete sincerity, that this was not your department. And the part that catches up with you later is not that you refused. It is that it never once occurred to you that you might have been the one asked.

Mercy Is Not A Profession

Let us clear one thing first, because the confusion under it runs through everything else. Mercy is not forgiveness. Forgiveness is what happens when somebody owes you and you release it. Mercy is what happens when somebody is in trouble in front of you and you meet the trouble, and whether they owe you anything does not come into it at all. You can be merciful to a man you have never had a conversation with. That is most of what mercy is.

Which is why the question mercy asks is short. Not what did he do to end up standing there. Just: what does he need, and can I reach it?

Jesus said the sentence this message stands on while professionals were questioning Him. The religious men had a system. It was good, it worked, and it had one hole in it exactly the size of a human being.

Go and learn what this means: "I desire mercy, and not sacrifice." For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.Matthew 9:13

Sacrifice is scheduled. It happens at the right hour, in the right place, performed by the people appointed to perform it. Mercy has no hour and no appointed person, and that is precisely what made it so hard for them to hear. God was not asking for a better version of what they were already excellent at. He was asking for the thing that happens in a corridor.

You are already qualified for the only mercy God is asking of you today. Matthew 9:13 puts the whole qualification into four words, I desire mercy, and the desire in that sentence is His rather than a credential of yours, and the Spirit is not waiting on a job title before He nudges a man at half past four.

Now hear the size of the thing. The Samaritan was carrying oil and wine because everybody on that road carried oil and wine. He did not go home for supplies. He had no plan for the man's life. He got down, he bandaged, he walked instead of riding, and then he went on to wherever he had been going. That is not a calling. That is an afternoon interrupted.

And the two who went past were not monsters. This is the part we skip. They were busy, they were on their way to real things, and they had a strong and sincere sense that this trouble belonged to somebody better equipped.

You have been standing closer to the need than anybody better qualified. No encouragement of mine could hand you that; it is written into the shape of the whole book, the staff, the jar of oil, the five loaves, God working with what is already in a hand rather than with equipment somebody was waiting to be issued, and His Spirit moves ordinary people the same way He moved a Samaritan down off his animal.

What Six Feet Costs And What It Does Not

Here is the fear under that corridor, and it is a reasonable fear, so I will not talk you out of it as though it were silly. If I speak, I am in. If I say the sentence, I have opened a file with no closing date on it. A great many people learned that once, the hard way, and afterward built a wall in the only place a person knows how to build one, which is across everything.

But look at what is actually being asked. Four steps. One sentence. Is that machine giving you trouble. Or nothing at all, just standing there long enough to hand across the tray from the other copier. It is finished inside ninety seconds and both men drive home. Nobody moves in. Nobody becomes anybody's project. The act is over when it is over.

You are being handed a size of mercy that cannot swallow you. That is the word talking and not me. Galatians 6:10 says that as we have opportunity we are to do good to everyone, and an opportunity has edges by definition, a beginning and an end and a corridor it happens in, and the Spirit who prompts a man at half past four is not the author of the dread telling him he has just signed something.

And a word now to the reader who went careful. You did not become a hard person. You gave a great deal, somebody took it and did not have the decency to be sorry about it, and something in you learned. That is not wickedness. That is a bruise behaving the way bruises behave.

You have a heart that is softer than the last five years of your behavior. The Spirit reads what is under the carefulness the way a doctor reads what is under a bandage, and it is written in Psalm 103 that He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, which is a sentence about His memory rather than a sentence about your record.

One more, because it derails more people than the fear does. Mercy is not a feeling you have to work up first. Ray does not need to become fond of Dennis, or to feel a swell of anything at all in his chest. He needs four steps.

You are holding the ability to act before you feel anything whatsoever. You do not have to take my word for that. Luke 10:34 records everything the Samaritan did and never once tells us what he felt while he did it, and the Holy Spirit works with obedient hands every bit as readily as with a moved heart, and rather more often.