Paying Off a Gift

He was eight and it was a Tuesday and there was a plate of something on the table.

Rafa remembers it with the peculiar accuracy children have for the wrong details. He remembers the plate. He remembers that the window was open and there was a bird outside making the same three notes. He remembers his grandmother saying it, plainly, not making an occasion of it, in about four sentences, while she was doing something with her hands.

And he remembers that he believed her immediately and completely, the way you believe a woman like that when you are eight.

He is forty-six now.

And in the summer, at a family table, somebody's child asked him a question about it and he opened his mouth to answer and what came out was a description of a system.

Not the four sentences. A system: what you do, what you keep up, what happens if you fall behind, how you get back on. He heard himself and it was fluent and it was not unkind and it was nothing whatsoever like what his grandmother had said with a bird outside.

He excused himself and went out to the yard.

Because the question that arrived out there was one he could not get away from, and it was this: when did that turn into an account?

Not who told him. Nobody told him. He has been through it since and he cannot find a single person who said anything of the kind, and his grandmother certainly never did.

It simply became one, somewhere between eight and forty-six, and he has been paying it off ever since with a diligence that everybody in that family admires. He is the one who is always there. He is the one who does the difficult visits. He has not missed a thing in thirty years.

And underneath every bit of it is a running total that he has never once looked at directly, and out in that yard he understood that he does not know what the total is for, or who is holding it, or what happens if it is ever cleared.

And you may have your own yard. There may have been four sentences once, in a kitchen, that you believed immediately, and there may be a system now, and no memory at all of the handover.

Scripture uses one word for it and the word is not wages

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it for decades and it was never yours.

You are not in debt for this. You never were. Scripture sets the two words side by side on purpose, and the one it uses for what you have is not the one you have been paying against, and it is the Holy Spirit, not your diligence, who makes any of it real in a person. Set it down here in the yard. It is heavy, and there was never an account under it.

Now hear the sentence, and notice that it is a deliberate contrast.

For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.Romans 6:23

Two words, put next to each other so that nobody can confuse them.

Wages, which is what a man is owed. You work, and at the end of the week there is an amount, and it is yours by right, and nobody thanks anybody.

And gift, which is the other word, and which cannot become wages no matter how long anybody works at it. That is not a technicality. A gift that is paid for is no longer a gift at all, and the whole sentence is built so that you cannot get from one column to the other.

What you have is in the second column. It was in the second column when you were eight with a bird outside the window, and it has not moved since.

That is true of you right now, at forty-six, standing in a yard. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who made it so, and He has never once opened an account in anybody's name.

Now let me be careful, because there is a ditch here and I am not putting you in it.

Nothing here says the thirty years were wasted or that being the one who does the difficult visits is a fault. It is not. Those visits mattered and the people you sat with were held, and Scripture honors every one of them and His Spirit was in them.

And nothing here says you should stop. This is not a message about doing less.

The point is only what the doing has been for, and it has been for a total that does not exist.

Here is the tender part. What has kept the system running is not guilt.

It is that a gift that size, given to a child by somebody he loved, is genuinely hard to carry, and paying is a way of carrying it that a man can understand. Debt is manageable. It has arithmetic in it. Sheer unearned gift has none, and there is nothing for a capable man to do with it.

So you turned it into something you could work at, and you have worked at it beautifully for thirty years. Scripture calls it a gift and His Spirit is the one who hands it over, and neither of them ever set a price on it.