The Roster Nobody Signed

The third floor walkway gets its sun at about four, and by half past Corinne is out there with the watering can, doing the two pots by her door and the one on the rail that never quite recovers from August.

Twelve doors on this side of the building. Hers is number three. The concrete runs flat and straight past all of them and then turns left at the end, at fourteen.

Fourteen has a screen door that does not sit right in its frame, so it claps twice every time it shuts. There is a boy at fourteen who brings a math book out and sits on the walkway with his back against the railing, because the light is better out here and because it is quieter. Corinne has passed him with grocery bags in both hands more times than she could count. She knows the number of that apartment. She does not know one name that lives behind it.

Three years ago she stood up at the Wednesday meeting and said it out loud, in front of everybody, with real heat in her voice. Somebody should do something for that family. And she meant it, all the way down to the floor. A woman with a clipboard nodded and wrote it on the second page. The pastor said good, that is exactly the kind of thing we ought to be organized about, let us make a list. Somebody else said we could put up a sign-up sheet, one household a week.

The list was never made. Corinne has watched the bulletin board in the church hallway for three years, and there have been sign-up sheets for the parking lot cleanup and the nursery schedule and the fall potluck, and there has never once been one for fourteen.

So she waits. She waits the way a person waits for a bus she has decided is coming. And she is not idle in the meantime, she is a woman who does things, she has mentioned it to two other people and prayed about it more than twice, and every time it rises in her chest she sets it back on the shelf marked not yet organized.

Last Thursday she carried four bags up the outside stairs and set them down at her own door to dig out her keys. And while she was down there in the four o'clock light, she did something she has never admitted to a living soul. She counted. Heel to toe along the concrete, past four, past seven, past eleven, all the way to the turn at the end.

Forty feet. Forty feet from her mat to theirs. She stood back up with her keys in her hand and understood, in one clean and unwelcome second, that she had spent three years waiting for an institution to close a distance she could walk in eleven steps.

You have a forty feet. You know exactly where it is, and you could pace it right now without getting up. And somewhere along the way you picked up the idea that the thing you were waiting for had to be big, and official, and signed off by somebody with more authority than you have ever been given.

The List Was Never The Point

Let us take the smallest thing first, because it is sitting underneath all the rest of it. Mercy and forgiveness are not the same work. Forgiveness is what you do about a debt somebody owes you. Mercy is what you do about a need in front of you, and it never stops to ask whether the person owes you anything at all. A stranger who has not wronged you in his life can receive mercy from you before dark. Most mercy is exactly that. It is not a settlement. It is a hand.

You are holding something today that is already the right size. The Spirit put that restlessness in you long before you read a word of mine, and it is written into Isaiah 58:7 in plain household nouns, bread and a coat and a door.

Look at how the prophet says it. There is no committee anywhere in the line.

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover him, and not to hide yourself from your own flesh?Isaiah 58:7

Bread. House. Cover. Not one of those is a program word. You cannot delegate bread. You cannot form a subcommittee about a coat. Every noun in that verse is the kind of thing a person carries in from the car.

And then there is the last clause, which is the one that quietly undoes the roster. Not to hide yourself. Hiding is what the prophet names. Not failing to organize, not neglecting to volunteer, not falling short of a standard nobody ever published. Hiding. Which is a strange word to hear if you have been standing in plain sight on a walkway for three years, waiting.

You have been kept near that door for a reason that has nothing to do with a clipboard. No sentence of mine could put you there. Scripture did, the moment it told a person not to hide herself from her own flesh, and His Spirit is what has kept you noticing that door month after month.

Here is the part that will loosen something. Waiting for the roster was never cowardice and it was never coldness. It was arithmetic. You had done the sum, and the sum said this need is bigger than one woman with a watering can, and you were not wrong about the size of the need. You were wrong about the size of the piece.

Eleven Steps Is A Real Number

The gap between somebody should do something and I am the somebody is not a gap in courage. It is a gap in measurement.

You were never asked for a project. That is Scripture, not sentiment, and the Holy Spirit is what makes it move. A cup of cold water is the unit Jesus reached for when He could have picked any unit in the world, and He put it on the permanent record without one word of apology for its size.

When mercy gets imagined large, it turns into a project. A project needs a plan, a plan needs a committee, a committee needs a list, and the list needs somebody to make it, and now four people are standing between a woman and a walkway she can see from her own kitchen window. Shrink it back to its actual size and every one of them disappears, because not one of them was ever required.

And shrinking it does something else, something the roster could never have done for you. A small thing has an end. You can finish it. A project has no edge and no last day, and that is exactly what your body has been bracing against every time this rose up in your chest. Mercy does not hand you a person to keep. It hands you a need to meet, once, at a size you can carry, and then it lets you go back inside and close your own door.

You are free to do one small thing and stop there. It is written down, in Psalm 103:14, that He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, and the same Spirit who put it there is standing in your kitchen while you read it.

And if today is the day you have nothing at all, hear this before you go one line further. You are held on a day when you cannot hand anybody a thing. You are not taking my word for that. He promised never to leave you and never to forsake you, and His Spirit is what carries a promise off a page and into a room. There is no bill at the bottom of this page. Mercy toward you is not a loan against your future usefulness.