The Neighbor's Turn to Mourn

The news came the way news comes on a street like that, which is to say the doors told him before anybody did.

Cars at odd hours. The son's truck. Then, in the morning, a chair brought out into the courtyard and set against the wall for no reason at all except that somebody had needed to move something.

Hana died on Thursday. She was seventy one and she had lived in that house since before he was born, and for thirty years she had handed things over the low wall between their two courtyards: bread, lemons, a bowl of something, a folded blanket the week his boy was ill.

He buried his own wife last spring.

And what he has been doing since Thursday afternoon, and he is ashamed of it, is finding reasons not to go over.

He cooked. He has a dish sitting on his own counter covered with a cloth, and it has been sitting there since Friday morning, and every few hours he looks at it and does something else.

Because he knows what that house smells like this week. That is the whole of it. He knows the exact smell of a house in the first week: the flowers somebody sent that are already too sweet, and the coffee somebody keeps making, and the particular staleness of a room where the windows have been shut because the neighbors keep arriving. His own house smelled like that in April and he can bring it back with no effort at all, and he does not want to walk into it.

There is a second thing underneath, and it is worse, and he has not said it in words even inside his own head. He is afraid that when he walks in there he will be no use. That he will stand in the middle of the room with a dish in his hands and have nothing, because he has nothing, because whatever a man is supposed to have on the far side of a year he does not have it.

So the dish sits on the counter under a cloth and the low wall between the two courtyards has never looked so wide.

If anybody has stood in a kitchen looking at a covered dish like that, stay with me. There is a half sentence in Romans that settles the whole question of what a man has to bring.

The command is given to hospitality, not to having something to say

Here is the line, and it is short enough that people read past it.

Distributing to the necessity of saints; given to hospitality.Romans 12:13

Two clauses. Both of them are about hands.

Distributing to the necessity. That is bread and money and a covered dish and a chair carried out into a courtyard. It is not a conversation. It is not an insight. It is a thing that was on this side of the wall being moved to that side of the wall.

Given to hospitality. The word underneath it in the Greek is literally the love of strangers, and it means pursuing it, chasing it down. Not waiting until you feel equal to it.

Nowhere in that verse is a man required to have anything in his mouth. The whole instruction is about what is in his hands and where his feet take it.

You are qualified for that doorway by a covered dish and nothing else, and you were qualified on Thursday afternoon before you cooked a thing. Romans 12:13 is the written word putting the whole command on distributing and hospitality, and the Spirit who breathed that line is standing in a kitchen with a man who has been looking at a cloth since Friday.

And look where Paul puts it. Two verses later, in the same run of instructions, he writes weep with them that weep. Not explain to them that weep. Not encourage. Not conclude. Weep. The whole passage assumes a man arriving with wet eyes and a dish, and it asks him for nothing else at all.

You have the entire assignment already in your two hands, and you had it before you knew what you would say when the door opened. Romans 12:15 says plainly to weep with them that weep, and the Holy Spirit does not send a man next door with a requirement he cannot meet.

The smell of that house is why you are the one to go

Now the thing he is running from, and I want to turn it over, because he has it exactly backwards.

He does not want to walk into that room because he knows the smell.

Every other person on that street is going to walk in there this week and it will be strange to them. They will get through the doorway on nerve. Some of them will talk too much and some of them will stand in the wrong place and one of them will say a thing about God's purposes that lands on that family like a stone, and none of them will mean any harm by it.

And then there is one man on that street who is going to walk into that room and not flinch, because his own house smelled like that in April.

That is not a wound he carries into their house. That is the reason the room can hold him. He will know without asking that the son has not eaten. He will know that the windows should be opened, and he will know it is not his place to open them, and he will know to sit down rather than hover, and none of that came from a book.

The very thing making him stand in his kitchen is the thing that makes him useful in theirs.

You are the one man on that street who can carry that room, and you were made able to do it by the April you would never have chosen. 2 Corinthians 1:4 says the comfort a person receives in trouble is the comfort they hand to somebody in any trouble, and the Spirit of God has never wasted a single thing that a man has been through.

Nothing over there requires you to be finished

Let me take the second fear off, because it is heavier than the first one and he has not admitted it to anybody.

He is afraid he will be no use because he is not done himself.

Here is the plain truth. Nobody in that house is expecting a man who has finished. If anything, a man who had finished would be a problem in that room. A neighbor who arrived on Sunday visibly at peace, with a settled face and a good word, would be the least comforting object in the whole house.

What that family needs is somebody who is still in it. Somebody whose hands shake a bit when he sets the dish down. Somebody who does not need them to be all right by the end of the visit, because he is not all right himself and knows better than to ask it of anybody.

And there is a mercy in this that nobody mentions. He is not going over there to fix that house. He is going over to put a dish on a table. He can be there fourteen minutes. He can leave. Nobody is grading the visit.

You are not required to be well before you go, and you were never asked to arrive over there as a finished man. Romans 12:13 asks for hospitality and asks nothing whatsoever about the state of the one being hospitable, and the Holy Spirit works through hands that are still shaking.