One person gives freely, yet gains even more; another withholds unduly, but comes to poverty.
Proverbs 11:24 (NIV)
Two Outcomes Side by Side
One person gives freely and gains even more. Another withholds unduly and comes to poverty. Those are two outcomes, set side by side, with no time given for how long either took.
Somebody watched households across a lifetime and set down the shape of what he saw, and unduly is his word for the second man. It’s a word about proportion. He held on past the size of the case in front of him, and he came to poverty.
Third shift at the mill starts at eleven, and the building is loud in a way that settles into the chest. Two men run the roll floor. One of them has been on it since before the rebuild and the other came over from the feed plant in the spring, and everything that passes between them is about the machine, the choke on number three and the smell that means a bearing. At lunch the older of the two takes his sandwich out to the yard in any weather, and in nine months they’ve never eaten at the same table.
At the start a person would pick neither of those endings. The withholding in that second half is a particular kind, and a man who gave everything he had and has nothing at seventy is not in it. Generosity here isn’t wages, and poverty here isn’t a verdict.
The bakery truck backs into the dock, early by an hour, and the floor changes shape around both of them. The man from the feed plant is off his stool and pulling the first pallet before the driver has the trailer open. The driver says the schedule went up in the office and the new man’s on days from Monday. The older one says he asked for it in June, and that he’d have asked sooner if he’d known the man was doing doubles. The new man stands there with his hand on the jack and asks him to say it again.
A Prayer to Remember
Father, I keep count of what I’ve given and I could tell you the figure right now. Take the counting off me. Let the giving go out of my hands and out of my head behind it, and let whatever comes back come back in a form that won’t go on a list.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
