He Ate the Half I Was Going to Give Away

Mrs. Ames makes buns on a Friday and she gives me one, and it is a whole one, and it is mine.

I cut it in half on the Friday I am telling you about. I did it on the board with the good knife handled properly and I did it carefully, because I wanted the halves to be actually equal and not one of those halves that is technically a half. And I put one of them on a plate on the side, because I was going to take it up to Sam Hollis, who had been in bed all week with something and had been at the window on Wednesday looking extremely bored.

I had made the decision. I want that understood before the rest of it. It was not a plan I was thinking about. The bun was cut and the plate was on the side and I was getting my boots on.

Bucky came through the window. The kitchen window is the kind that opens outward at the bottom and it had been open about that far since June and it had never been a problem before, and he got his whole head and most of his neck through it and took the half off the plate.

He did not take the half on the board. He did not take the whole thing, because there was no whole thing anymore. He took the exact half I had cut for somebody else, and he ate it in the yard, and then he stood there looking at nothing.

And I was much angrier than a half bun accounts for.

I had the other half. I still had the other half. I could have eaten it or I could have taken it up to Sam, which is the thing that took me until the evening to see, and I did not think of it for four hours, and I would like to know why.

I asked Dad about it at supper. He said, in the end, that I was not upset about a bun and that I was upset about being robbed of a thing I had already decided to do, and that it was not a small thing to be robbed of and I should not let anybody tell me it was.

Then he asked me where the other half was, and I said on the board, and he did not say anything else, and I took it up to Sam Hollis at about half past six.

A sentence nobody else recorded

Paul is saying goodbye to a group of men he will not see again, and at the end of it he quotes something that appears nowhere else in the Bible.

I have shewed you all things, how that so labouring ye ought to support the weak, and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, how he said, It is more blessed to give than to receive. (Acts 20:35)

Nobody wrote that one down in a gospel. It survived because people remembered it and repeated it, which tells you something about how much it was said and how it landed on the people who heard it.

And the claim in it is not that giving is right. Everybody already knows giving is right. The claim is that it is more blessed, which is a comparison, and comparisons are about which of two good things is better rather than about which one is allowed.

You are being told that the better end of the exchange is the end you were standing on. Acts 20:35 makes it a comparison rather than an instruction, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as good news for somebody who has had it taken away.

Which means that having a giving stolen off you is a real loss. Not a small one and not a silly one. A person who had lined something up to hand over and did not get to has lost the better half of the transaction and is allowed to feel it.

You have not been silly to mind about it. The written word puts the blessing on the giving end, and His Spirit is what makes that a permission to feel something rather than a rebuke for feeling it.

What is still in your hand

There is a moment in Acts a few chapters earlier where two men are asked for money they do not have, and what they say is one of the best sentences in the book.

Then Peter said, Silver and gold have I none; but such as I have give I thee. (Acts 3:6)

Such as I have. Not such as I had. Not such as I would have had if things had gone differently. The whole of the sentence lives in the present tense, and the present tense is where a person is when they have just been robbed of a plan.

He does not spend a single word on what he does not have. He names it in half a clause and moves on to the half a clause that matters.

You are holding something right now, and Acts 3:6 puts the whole weight on what is in the hand at present. The Spirit of God is what turns attention from the plate on the side to the board on the table.

And nothing in the account suggests Peter had planned any of it. It was an ordinary walk to a prayer meeting.

You have not needed a plan in order to have something to hand over. Acts 3:6 records a man giving out of an unremarkable afternoon, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from a story into a boy who still has half a bun on a board.