Whatever You Think Is Fine

The coat came in with a torn lining, a broken zip and a pocket that had been mended once already by somebody in a hurry.

She had it on the table under the good lamp for the better part of two evenings. She unpicked the old mend properly rather than going over it, matched the lining as near as anybody could without the original, put in a new zip, and pressed the whole thing so that it came back looking less like a repair and more like a coat that had never been in trouble.

The woman who collected it held it up at arm's length and made the sound people make, and then reached into her bag and said the sentence everybody says. What do I owe you?

And she said what she always says.

Whatever you think is fine.

Now here is the thing nobody in that room knows. She can tell you, to the penny, what the lining cost, and the price of a zip that length in two colors, and what a reel of thread is now compared with what it was. She is not vague about money. She is precise about money, all day, every day, in every direction except one.

Her own hours are the only thing in the whole house with no number on them.

She could not tell you where it came from either. It was not a sermon and it was not one person. It was in the air of the house before she was ten, the way a smell gets into a coat: that wanting money is a bit grubby, that people who talk about being paid are showing something about themselves, that the right kind of person does not ask.

She goes home and empties the little purse onto the kitchen table under the lamp, and counts it.

It does not cover the lining and the zip.

And she is not angry with the woman, who was kind and delighted and had absolutely no idea, and who asked a fair question and got an answer that was not one. That is the whole problem. She was asked plainly and she answered with a shrug, and a shrug is what she has always had where the number should be.

And you know that walk home.

You know the arithmetic that runs the whole way, and the way it stops when you get to the door, because it is not a conversation you can have with anybody, including yourself. You have shaved what you wanted before anyone else got the chance to. You have said "whatever suits you" so often that it comes out before the thought does. And underneath it, never said out loud in your life, is the belief that if you ever named a proper number, everybody in the room would see something greedy in you that you have spent your whole life keeping down.

The sentence you inherited is half a verse

Let me put the two halves side by side, because one of them has been running the house for about forty years.

What went into the air of that house was that money is the root of all evil. What Scripture actually says is that the love of money is the root of all evil, and the difference between those two sentences is the difference between a warning about an appetite and a suspicion of a thing.

The warning is real. Paul is not being casual: he is talking about a hunger that has taken a person's heart and got its hands on the steering wheel, and he says people have wandered off from the faith following it. That is worth hearing. It has nothing whatever to do with a woman who has repaired a coat and needs to say a number.

You are not standing under a verse that was never written about you. Scripture puts the love of it in that sentence and not the thing itself, and it aims the warning at an appetite rather than at a person's honest wage, and it is the Holy Spirit and not your own guilt who tells the difference between conviction and an old inherited flinch.

And now let me say the opposite thing just as plainly, because a person raised the way you were raised will hear the correction and swing straight past it into something worse.

Money is not holy either. It is not a reward. It is not a scoreboard. It is not evidence of anything about anybody, and a full account is not a certificate of favor, and an empty one is not a report on your walk with God. He has never once used a bank balance as a mark on a person, in either direction. If that were the system, the prophets would have been the wealthiest men in Israel and the widow with the two mites would have gone home rebuked.

You were never being graded by the number at the bottom of a page. His word says the Lord looketh on the heart while man looketh on the outward appearance, and that has never quietly meant the opposite when the outward appearance happens to be financial, and the Spirit of God is at work in you on things that no ledger anywhere has a column for.

Jesus put a wage in the middle of a sending

There is one line that settles this, and He said it while sending people out with almost nothing.

Go not from house to house. And in the same house remain, eating and drinking such things as they give: for the labourer is worthy of his hire.Luke 10:7

Hold both halves of that, because He did.

He sent them out carrying no purse. Travel light, do not fuss, do not shop around the houses for a better welcome. And in the same breath, without the faintest embarrassment, He states as a settled fact that the worker deserves the wage. He does not apologize for it, He does not hedge it, and He does not add a paragraph about not wanting it too much.

Paul thought that line was so important that he quotes it word for word to Timothy, in the same sentence as the ox that must not be muzzled while it treads out the corn. The animal is allowed to eat while it works. That is in the Bible.

A number in your mouth is information, and it has never once been greed. Luke 10:7 puts the laborer's worth in the words of Jesus Himself, and a fact He was willing to say out loud to a room of workers is not a thing you need to whisper, and the Spirit He gives is called the Spirit of truth, which is a good name for the one who helps a person say what a thing actually cost.

And go further into the Word on this, because God is fiercer about it than most of us are comfortable with. The wage of the laborer is not to be kept back overnight. Do not oppress a hired servant that is poor and needy, whether he is your brother or a stranger, but give him his hire on the day he earns it. James says the wages of the reapers kept back by fraud cry out, and that the cries have reached the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth.

That is not a God who thinks a person asking to be paid is being unspiritual. That is a God who hears an unpaid wage from a long way off.

You are not being difficult when you say what your work is worth. Scripture treats a withheld wage as something heaven notices and a paid one as ordinary righteousness, and the Holy Spirit is not the source of the small voice that tells you a shrug is more godly than a sentence.