The List of Who Came

The storm took half of Efrain's roof on a Thursday night, and by Saturday morning there were twenty-two people on his street with ladders.

He had not asked. That is the first thing to understand. He had been up on a chair in his own front room at two in the morning with a mop and a bucket and two of his wife's good saucepans catching what was coming through, and he had told nobody except his cousin, and his cousin has a mouth on him.

They came anyway. Don Beto, who is eighty and did not go up the ladder but stood at the bottom telling everybody they were doing it wrong. The Herrera boys. The woman from the corner whose name he only learned that weekend. Somebody's brother-in-law with a truck and a compressor. Two men from the church who worked until it was too dark to see and came back on the Sunday after Mass in their good trousers.

The roof was done by Sunday evening. And on the Monday morning, Efrain got a notebook.

He wrote down every name. Beside every name, the hours. Beside the hours, what they had brought.

And then he began.

He fixed the Herreras' fence. He drove Doña Luz to her appointments for a month, then two. He wired the lights in the corner shop, which took him three evenings, and he would not take a thing for it. He got up at five to help the brother-in-law load his truck, on a day when he had his own work to go to. He kept the notebook in the drawer with the tape and the fuses, and he crossed names off, and when he crossed one off he felt something ease for about a day and a half.

Two years. He got about halfway.

Don Beto found the notebook. Of course he did, he was looking for a fuse.

He did not say anything that day. He said it on the Sunday, at the long table in the street, with everybody there and the plates going down the line, and he said it loudly, because he is eighty and has stopped being careful.

"Efrain. Stand up."

Efrain stood up.

"You have been paying us back for two years."

Everyone laughed, because everyone knew.

"Sit down, mijo. Listen to me. You are trying to pay back a fiesta." He gestured at the whole table, the whole street, the plates. "It cannot be done. This is not arithmetic. It was never a loan. And every hour you spend working it off, you are calling us lenders, and none of us came up that ladder as a lender."

Then he sat down himself and said, in an ordinary voice, "Eat something. Your wife made the rice."

Now, let me ask you about the last good thing God did.

It happened. Something opened, or something held, or something you had been dreading did not go the way you had rehearsed it going.

And what did you do the following week?

You started working it off. Not consciously, maybe. But there was a rise in effort, a private sense of what you now owed, a feeling that the account had shifted in a direction that had to be answered.

Nobody gave to Him first

Paul finishes eleven chapters of the densest reasoning he ever wrote, and then he stops arguing and asks three questions in a row, and the third one closes the notebook.

Or who has first given to Him that it might be paid back to him again?Romans 11:35

Sit with what he is actually saying, because it is not sentimental. It is a matter of accounting.

A debt requires an opening balance. Somebody has to have given first. And in the whole history of the world, nobody has. Not one person has ever handed God something He did not first hand them, which means there is no ledger, because there is nothing to enter in the first column.

Your breath this morning was His. The strength you were planning to repay Him with is His. Even the desire to repay Him was put in you by His Spirit, which makes the whole project the strangest kind of circle.

So hear this over you, right now, with the notebook still open. You owe Him nothing that could be worked off, and the two years you have spent easing an account were not lifting one entry, because there was no entry. That is written, and it is the Spirit of God who takes a written fact like this and makes a person actually sit back down at a table, which is the harder half.

Now let me name the thing Don Beto named, because it is the sting of it.

Working it off calls Him a lender.

That is what your repayment scheme says about God, and you would never say it out loud. But that is the content of it. A man who is working off a kindness has quietly reclassified the giver, and everybody at the table can hear it except him.

And here is the cost. Efrain missed two years. He was at every gathering and he was at none of them, because a man crossing names off a list is not really eating with anybody. He was in the street with all of them and he was still up on that roof.

You have been doing that with God. You have been in the room with Him for months, and working the whole time.

Let me guard this before somebody misreads it.

Gratitude is real, and service is real, and Scripture is emphatic about both. A grateful man will absolutely end up fixing a fence and wiring a shop, and that is beautiful and it is meant to happen.

The difference is whether it comes out of the fiesta or out of the notebook. Same fence. Same hours. One of them is love and the other one is arithmetic, and only one of them lets a man sit down and taste his wife's rice.

There was a man five hundred years ago who kept the most detailed notebook in his century, and he wrote afterward that a Christian is the freest lord of all, subject to no one, and at the same time the most dutiful servant of all, subject to everyone. Both at once. He served harder after he stopped repaying than he ever had while he was, because a man who owes nothing can give everything away.