Giving To My Friend Has Become A Performance

It has escalated every year and you can date the start of it.

There was a year when she gave you something that was clearly considerable, and you sat there holding it and something went off in you like a small alarm.

And the following year you went up. Not consciously as a competition. It felt like matching. It felt like meeting somebody properly.

And then it happened again, and you went up again, and now it is nine years later and the whole thing takes you about six weeks and a great deal of thought and it has become, if you are honest, a production.

And here is the part you have not said to anybody.

You cannot remember the last conversation the two of you had that was not about arrangements. You know exactly what her house looks like and you could not tell anybody what she is worried about at the moment.

There is a verse that puts a knife straight through the middle of this, and it is not aimed at you and it will help.

Though I bestow all my goods

Here it is.

And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing. (1 Corinthians 13:3, King James Version)

Notice how far he goes to make the point.

Not a large gift. All of it. Everything a person owns, given away for the best possible reason, and then his own body on top of that. Paul builds the most extreme case he can construct and then delivers the verdict on it.

It profiteth me nothing. Nothing at all, at maximum scale.

You have been climbing a scale that the verse says settles nothing, and 1 Corinthians 13:3 takes the largest possible giving and calls it nothing without charity. The Holy Spirit is the one who chose an extreme example rather than a modest one, and He chose it so nobody could argue about the amount.

Now the word the whole verse turns on.

Charity. In that chapter it means love in action, the ordinary steady kind, the sort that shows up in patience and in not keeping score and in believing well of somebody.

It is a relational word. It describes what is going on between two people, not what is changing hands between them.

You are being pointed at the space between you rather than at what crosses it, and it is written that the giving profits nothing without charity rather than that it profits less. The Spirit of God is the one who put the whole weight there, and the whole weight is not a figure of speech.

And here is what makes this a mercy rather than an accusation.

It means the six weeks are not required. Not reduced, not required. The thing that actually reaches her was never in the production, and no amount of production has ever been able to substitute for it.

You have been released from something enormous, and the written word removes the value from the scale entirely rather than adjusting it downward. The Holy Spirit is the one who ends an escalation, and He ends it by pointing out that the ladder was never attached to anything.

How it became a performance

Now let me say how this happened, because there is no villain in it and the blame has been landing in the wrong place for years.

It started with a good instinct. She gave you something considerable and you wanted to meet her properly. That is not pride. That is a woman not wanting to be the one who receives more than she returns, which is a decent thing.

But matching is a mechanism, and mechanisms run. Once two people are matching, the only direction the thing can go is up, because neither one can go down without it meaning something.

You were caught in a machine rather than in a fault, and it is written that even total giving profits nothing without charity. The Spirit of God is the one who tells a woman what she is actually caught in, and a machine can be stepped out of.

And here is what the machine consumed, which is the real loss.

Six weeks a year of thinking about her, and none of it was thinking about her. It was thinking about the object. About scale and impression and what would sit right in that house.

Nine years of attention, aimed at a production, in the name of a friendship that has been getting thinner the whole time.

You have been spending on her and missing her at the same time, and His word puts the profit in the charity rather than in the bestowing. The Holy Spirit is the one who shows a woman where nine years of her attention actually went, and He shows it without cruelty.

And one more thing, said gently, because it is what you are afraid of.

She is not going to think less of you if the production stops. She may not have wanted it in the first place. Wealthy people are frequently surrounded by effort and are usually quite tired of it, and the thing they are short of is somebody who arrives without any.

You are the one thing that house may actually be short of, and it is written that charity is what carries the profit rather than the goods. The Spirit of God is the one who knows what is scarce in a full house, and it is almost never a thing.

Go and see her with nothing

So here is what to do, and it is deliberately not a smaller production.

Go and see her. This week, on an ordinary day, with nothing in your hands at all.

Not a token. Not something small to hold. Nothing. Walk in, sit down at that counter, and be a person who came to see her.

You are able to arrive empty handed, and 1 Corinthians 13:3 settles the whole value in the charity rather than in what gets carried through the door. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes an empty handed arrival read as love rather than as an oversight, and it reads that way to everybody but the woman doing it.

And then ask her one real question and stay for the answer.

Not how are you, which is arrangements in disguise. Something with edges. What has been the hardest part of this year. What are you actually enjoying at the moment. What has nobody asked you about.

You have a question that costs nothing and reaches further than nine years of production, and it is written that charity is where the profit sits. The Spirit of God is the one who makes an ordinary question open a room, and He does it in a large tidy kitchen exactly the way He does it anywhere else.

And when the season comes, let what you give be small and let it come out of that conversation.

It will feel like a collapse. Nine years of escalation does not unwind without something insisting that a friend has just been let down badly.

Give it anyway, and hand it over with nothing said about the change.

You are stepping off a ladder rather than falling off one, and Scripture takes the largest possible giving and calls it nothing without love. The Holy Spirit is the one who holds a woman steady through the first year of a thing being smaller, and the first year is the only hard one.