I Have Always Been The Generous One

It has been forty years of being the one.

The one who covers it. The one who slips something to somebody on the way out. The one who says do not worry about that, I have got it, in the voice that ends the conversation.

Nobody appointed you. It grew. And somewhere along the line it stopped being something you did and became what you are in that family, and you were glad of it, and you never said so.

This year you cannot.

And here is what has surprised you about that. It is not the not having. You have been short before and you handled it and it did not touch you.

It is that you do not know who you are at the table now.

That is a much larger thing than a thin year and it deserves to be treated as one. There is a verse in Timothy that moves something from one place to another, and the moving is exactly what is needed here.

Godliness with contentment is great gain

Here it is.

But godliness with contentment is great gain. (1 Timothy 6:6, King James Version)

Great gain. That is a word about profit and increase, and Paul puts it deliberately, in a passage about people who had been measuring exactly that.

And he relocates it. The gain is not in the hands. It is in the man, and the two things named are godliness and contentment.

You have been counting your gain in one place while the verse counts it in another, and the Holy Spirit is the one who chose a profit word for that sentence. 1 Timothy 6:6 puts the great gain in the man rather than in what passes through him, and He chose it to be heard by people who thought in profit.

Now the pairing, because it is godliness with contentment and not either one alone.

Contentment there is not resignation. It is the state of a man who is not being moved about by what is in his hands this month. It is stability, and stability is a form of wealth that most people never notice until it is missing.

You are being described as holding great gain in a thin year, and it is written that godliness with contentment is great gain rather than a consolation for having less. The Spirit of God is the one who calls that gain, and He did not qualify the word.

And here is the thing about the man you have been for forty years.

The godliness was never in the covering. It was in the instinct that made a man reach. And the instinct is not a function of what is in the account, and it has not changed by one degree this year.

You have the whole of the thing that made you that man, and the Holy Spirit is the one who knows what a man is made of. Scripture locates the gain in godliness and contentment rather than in capacity, and He has not seen anything go out of you.

You are grieving a role, and that is allowed

Now let me say the plain thing about what this actually is, because naming it will help more than anything else in this article.

This is grief. Not worry. Grief.

Something that was genuinely yours, that you built over four decades and that people relied on and that you quietly loved being, is not available this year. That is a loss and it deserves the word.

You are mourning something real, and it is written that godliness with contentment is great gain rather than that a man should feel nothing about a change. The Spirit of God is the one who allows a grief to be called a grief, and calling it that is most of what it needs.

And it is worth saying that nobody around you is going to name it for you.

They will see a thin year. They will not see that a man is losing a station in a family that he has held since before some of them were born. That is invisible from the outside and it will stay invisible unless you say it, and men your age generally do not say it.

You have been carrying something nobody has offered to help with, and the Holy Spirit is the one who sees what a family cannot. The written word names godliness and contentment together rather than asking a man to be untouched, and He has been seeing it all autumn.

And there is one thing to be careful of, said as plainly as I can.

A man who cannot be the one who covers will often decide to be the one who is absent instead. It is the same instinct: if the station cannot be held, vacate the room. Do not do that. That is the only move in this that would cost the family something real.

You are still wanted at that table, and it is written that the gain is in the man rather than in his function. The Spirit of God is the one who keeps a man in a room he no longer knows his part in, and staying is the whole of the courage here.

The man survives the role

So here is what to do, and it is not a replacement for the old station and it is not pretending to be one.

Find one open handed thing that has nothing to do with capacity, and do it.

Carry something for somebody. Be the one who stays behind and helps clear up. Take the seat next to the person nobody has talked to. Drive somebody home who was working out how they were getting back.

You are able to be open handed with things that were never in the account, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as the same man rather than as a substitute. It is written that godliness with contentment is great gain, and it reads that way to everybody but him.

And here is why it will feel wrong for a while, so that the feeling does not stop you.

For forty years the open handedness was expressed one way, and the body learned it. Doing it another way feels like a smaller version of the same act, and it does not feel like the same act at all.

It is the same act. The feeling is lagging behind the fact by about a year, and it will catch up on its own.

You are doing the same thing you have always done, and His word puts the gain in the godliness rather than in the form it takes. The Spirit of God is the one who tells a man what he is actually doing when the feeling says otherwise.

And say the true sentence once, to one person, if you can find it in you.

Not a speech and not the details. One sentence to a wife or a brother or an old friend. This year has taken something off me and it is not the money.

You are allowed to say it out loud once, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a sentence like that safe in a man's mouth. It is written that the great gain is in the man rather than in what he can still do, and He is in the room before it gets said.