They Brought Out The Things She Had Made

She thinks what she can do does not count, and she has thought so for a very long time.

Here is what she can do.

She can cook. She can sit with somebody for an hour without needing to say anything, which is a rarer skill than anybody admits. She can mend things. She is very good with a frightened person.

Here is what she believes counts.

Organizing. Speaking. Leading something. Being on a committee. Having a role with a name on it.

She has none of those and she is not going to have them, and she has quietly concluded that she is on the edge of everything useful, holding a set of small domestic abilities that do not appear on any list of what matters.

So when there is a need, she waits to be asked, and she is not usually asked, because the people organizing are looking for organizers.

And the cost of it is that a woman with four genuinely useful hands has done almost nothing with them for eleven years, out of a conviction that they are the wrong hands.

She is sixty-four.

So let me ask you.

What can you actually do, with your actual hands, for one actual person?

The evidence they brought out was clothing

There is a moment in Acts that I would not part with for anything, and it is a room full of women holding up sewing.

A woman has died. The text gives her two names and says she was always doing good and helping the poor, and then Peter arrives, and here is what he walks into.

All the widows stood around him, crying and showing him the robes and other clothing that Dorcas had made while she was still with them.Acts 9:39

Read what they are holding.

Not a record of what she organized. Not the minutes of anything. Coats. Actual garments, being held up by the actual women wearing them, in a room she is lying dead in.

Acts 9 lets the whole account of a woman's life be a roomful of clothing she sewed for particular people, and the Spirit put that scene in the record rather than summarizing it, so the small work you do with your hands has never once been on the edge of anything. You are holding the thing itself.

Now, straight talk, the way you and I do it.

You have taken a set of abilities that feed and warm and steady actual human beings, and you have compared them against a set of abilities that arrange things, and you decided the arranging is the real work.

It is not. Arranging is how the real work gets to more people. It is a distribution method. It is not the thing itself.

Acts 9 shows the widows holding up the thing itself, and the Spirit was in the making of every one of those coats, which means eleven years of waiting to be asked have been eleven years of a warm pair of hands folded in a lap. You have four good hands and you are allowed to use them.

And notice the detail that undoes the whole hierarchy in your head.

While she was still with them. The widows are not describing a program. They are wearing the evidence.

Acts 9 has the recipients present, named as a group, holding what they were given, and the Spirit put those particular women in that particular room, so serving one person at a time has never been the lesser version of serving many. You are doing the whole of it when you do it once.