Not a Project, a Person

She has three pages of notes on her phone and she has read them twice in the car.

Not for herself. For Bernice, who is inside putting the kettle on, and who has no idea what is about to arrive on her porch. There is a course that runs on Thursday evenings at the community college. There is a woman at church who knows about the paperwork and would definitely talk to her. There is a way of doing the mornings that would change everything, and she knows it would, because it changed everything for her, eleven months ago, when the whole world came off its hinges and went back on straight.

That is the thing you have to understand about her, and it is not a criticism. She got free. Genuinely, unmistakably free, after a long time of not being, and it was not gradual and it was not subtle, and she has been walking around ever since like somebody carrying good news that will not fit in her mouth. She loves Bernice. She has loved Bernice for nineteen years. And she has watched her friend stand in the exact spot she used to stand in, and she has the map now, and she cannot for the life of her see why she should not simply hand it over.

So she comes up the steps with the phone in her hand and the first item already forming into a sentence.

And the afternoon does something else entirely.

Bernice comes out with two glasses and a jug with the ice going round in it, and a colander of green beans on her hip, and she says: sit, help me do these, I have been at these beans since two. So she sits. And there is a bowl between the two chairs and the beans go snap snap snap, and Bernice starts talking about her son's shoes, how he has gone through another pair in five months, how his feet are apparently going to keep going until he is a lighthouse, and she is laughing, and a wasp comes and gets sent away twice, and somebody's radio is on three houses down.

And the phone stays face down on the rail. Not because of any decision. There simply is not a gap anywhere in the afternoon big enough to put item one into.

Around five, with the beans done and her fingers green, she notices that Bernice has said one true thing about her own situation, unprompted, in the middle of a sentence about shoes. Just one. Said sideways, the way people say the real thing, and then moved on. And she notices that she almost did not hear it, because for the first two hours she had been holding three pages in her head and waiting for a door.

You are the one on the steps with the notes. And before we go one line further I want to say the thing that gets said last or not at all: the wanting to help is not the problem, and it is not pride, and it is not a fault to be repented of this afternoon. It is love, moving at the speed of somebody who has just been let out of somewhere. It is the most natural thing in the world. It has simply picked up the wrong tool, and there is a better one, and it was in your hand the whole time.

What the freedom was actually for

Paul answers this in one sentence, and the sentence is famous for its first half and quietly ignored for its second. The Holy Spirit put both halves in there, and the second half is the one with your Saturday in it.

For you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.Galatians 5:13

Called to freedom. That is the half everybody quotes. But he does not stop there, because a freedom with nothing on the other side of it is not what he had in mind for anybody. He says what it is for, in four words: through love serve one another. And the word he chooses for serve is not the polite one. It is the word for the work a servant does, the low, ordinary, hands-on work, done at somebody else's pace and in somebody else's kitchen.

Read the order he built it in. Freedom first, then love, then serving, and never the other way round. You were called to freedom for something, and Galatians 5 names what, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an assignment written to a whole church and makes it about a bowl of beans on a Saturday.

Now hold that word beside what was in your hand coming up the steps. A plan is not a servant's work. A plan is management. It is done at your pace, in your sequence, according to your assessment of what is wrong, and it puts you at the top of the page and the other person somewhere in the middle of it. And the terrible thing about a good plan for somebody else's life is that it can be entirely correct and still be the wrong thing to be holding, because the person on the porch did not ask for a plan. She asked for help with the beans.

Serving takes the shape the other person is already in. That is the whole difference, and it is not a small one. It goes where they are, at their speed, on their subject, and it does not require them to be a certain distance along before it will sit down. You have a freedom that was given for this exact use, promised in the same verse that gave you the freedom, and the Spirit who breathed the sentence is not asking you to be anybody's project manager.

Nobody gets to give the growth

Here is the second thing, and it takes the weight off you rather than putting more on.

There is a fear buried under the three pages, and it is not a bad fear, it is a loving one. It goes: if I do not manage this, nobody will, and then whatever happens next is partly on me. That is a heavy thing to carry up a set of porch steps, and Scripture takes it off you in one line.

Paul had been watching people take sides over who had done the most good in a church, and he wrote this: I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth (1 Corinthians 3:6-7). Planting and watering are real work and he does not belittle them. But growth is not in the job description of anybody with hands. That is not my modesty on your behalf, it is written into 1 Corinthians 3, and the same Spirit who inspired it is the one keeping you out of a role you were never given. You were never assigned anybody else's freedom, and that was settled before you loved her.

Feel what that does to the afternoon. If growth is yours to produce, then every conversation is a chance you might miss and every visit has a target on it, and you will spend two hours holding three pages and waiting for a door. If growth belongs to God, then you can sit down. You can be interested in the shoes. You can let the real thing arrive sideways at five o'clock, which is when it arrives, because that is how people are made.

And there is still plenty for you to do, because the low work is not nothing. Galatians 6 says to bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a person the difference between bearing a burden alongside somebody and taking their whole life off them. Bearing is done shoulder to shoulder. Taking it off them is done from in front, facing backward, and it never once made anybody free. This is yours on a porch with green fingers: the ordinary, unglamorous, shoulder to shoulder kind of help that Scripture actually asks for.

And plainly, before we go on, because I would rather say it and be unnecessary. If underneath all the managing your own days have got heavy, if the pushing is the only thing holding you up at the moment, tell one human being today, and if there is any danger around you, reach the crisis line where you live and let a real voice stay with you. Being helped is not a demotion from helping. It is the same room, from the other chair.