Two Hands and Nothing Spare

The dryers in the laundromat all finish within a minute of each other, and the whole room stands up at once.

She does not. She is on the bench at the back with two trash bags of washing at her feet and a phone in her hand, and the phone has just lit up with a message from the church group, the one somebody sends every Sunday night, and this week it says: Let's each be a blessing to somebody this week! with a small sun after it. She has read it four times. She has come off a double shift. There is a week of two children's clothes in the bags and a bus at ten past that she cannot miss and a body that has nothing left in it, and the message wants her to be a blessing to somebody, and she looks round the laundromat at the six people pulling sheets out of drums, and thinks, honestly and without bitterness, that she has nothing spare. Not time. Not strength. Not a thing in her hands that anyone could use.

The man at the next dryer is folding a fitted sheet one handed, because his other arm is in a sling, and the sheet is winning. He has been at it a while. Nobody has noticed, because everybody is doing their own.

She notices. And she has two hands. That is the whole of what she has this evening: two hands, and eleven minutes before the bus. And she does not know yet whether that counts, because everything she has ever been told about being a blessing to somebody assumed you had something over, and she has never in her life had something over.

You know that bench. You have your own version of the message and your own version of the bags, and you have read the words be a blessing while doing the arithmetic on yourself and coming up with nothing. And underneath the arithmetic there is a quieter question you have not said out loud: whether the whole idea of blessed was only ever for people who had some.

Blessed was never a word for people with some over

Let me take the word apart first, because the whole weight on you tonight is sitting on a wrong definition of it, and I read a definition the way I read a load rating: get it wrong at the start and everything built on it leans.

Blessed, in the mouth of Jesus, does not mean comfortable, and it does not mean supplied, and it does not mean having something over. He stood on a hillside and named it, out loud, over the poor in spirit, over the mourning, over the meek and the hungry and the persecuted (Matthew 5:3-10). Not one of those people had anything spare. Blessed, on that hill, means God's favor resting on a person, His face turned toward them, right where they stand, while nothing about where they stand has improved. It is a fact about Him and where He has put His attention. It was never a stock level.

So blessed to bless does not mean you were given plenty, pass some on. It cannot mean that, or Jesus was lying on the hill. It means the favor resting on you is the kind that travels. It goes through a person the way light goes through a window, and a window does not need to own the light.

You are blessed tonight on that bench, with two trash bags and nothing spare, because the favor of God is resting on you and it does not check the bags first. That is not my sentiment. It is written on the hillside in the plainest words in the Gospels, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence spoken over a crowd two thousand years ago and rests it on one tired woman by the dryers. Favor is His posture toward you. The bags have nothing to do with it.

What was put in your hands

Now the second half, and it is the half that lifts.

Peter writes to churches that had nothing over either, scattered people, many of them servants, and he tells them how a person with nothing spare gives. Read the whole shape of it.

As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God's varied grace. Whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, as one who serves by the strength that God supplies.1 Peter 4:10-11

Three things in that sentence and every one of them takes weight off you. First, as each has received: whatever is in your hands was put there. You did not generate it and you are not asked to. Second, stewards: a steward manages what belongs to somebody else. It was never yours to run out of. Third, and this is the one to carry to the bus, by the strength that God supplies. Not the strength you have over at the end of a double shift. The strength He supplies, into the act, at the moment of the act.

You have what was put in your hands, and the strength for using it is supplied and not stockpiled, and God is the supplier. It is written in Peter's letter, and the Spirit of God is the one who supplies it, in real time, into two hands that had nothing left. It is not the words on this page that make it so. It is His Spirit, doing tonight what Peter said He does.

And I want to be exact about the shape of what is in your hands, because you have been measuring the wrong thing. You have been counting what you have over. God counts what you have. Two hands. Eleven minutes. The ability to hold one corner of a sheet. That is not nothing. That is, in Peter's word, a gift, received, and it is within reach of exactly one person.

Freely, and nothing comes back

Here is the part that has to be said out loud on this site, because the word blessed has been used to sell people a bargain, and you may have been sold it, and I will not do it to you again.

When Jesus sent His friends out with nothing spare, no bag, no spare tunic, He gave them one rule for giving: freely you received, freely give (Matthew 10:8). Freely. Not as a stake in anything. Not to prime a pump. Not because something comes back round to you for it. What is in your hands came to you free, and it goes out of your hands free, and the transaction is over at that point because there never was one.

So hear me plainly. Holding that man's sheet does not earn you anything. It does not move God to top up your bags. It does not come back to you next week in some other shape. Nothing comes back to you for it, and that is not a loss, it is the whole beauty of it: the favor resting on you is not a loan, and what passes through your hands is not owed back to you. It is simply light going through a window.

You are free to give what is in your hands to one person, freely, with nothing on the other side of it, and that freedom is yours in Christ right now. Jesus said the word freely twice in one breath so nobody could miss it, and it is His Spirit who carries the freedom into a laundromat, not any technique of giving and certainly not any promise of return.