Rudy Stepped on My Drawing

I was drawing the whole farm from above, which is a thing I had been thinking about for a while and which is much harder than it sounds because you have to decide what a barn looks like from the top.

It took two days. I did it on the floor in the front room because the table is not big enough, and it was on four sheets taped together, and I had done the yard and both barns and the pond and I was on the top field.

Rudy came in and did his dance.

I need to explain about Rudy for anybody who does not know him. Rudy cannot crow. He tries every morning and what comes out is not a crow, and the thing he can do is dance, and he is genuinely, actually good at it. It is the only thing in the world he is good at and he knows it.

He came into the front room and he was doing the good one, the one with the turn in it, and he went right up the middle of the top field and out the other side across the pond, and his feet are not clean and his feet are not small.

And then he stopped, and looked at me, absolutely delighted.

That is the whole problem with this story. He was not sorry because he had no idea. He was pleased. He had come in and done the best thing he does in front of somebody he likes and he was standing there waiting for me to say something about it.

I said it was good. I said the turn was good, which it was.

Then I went in the kitchen and sat under the table for about ten minutes, which is a thing I do not do anymore because I am nine, and my dad did not say anything about me being under the table, he just put a plate of something down where I could reach it.

I mended it with more tape and drew the pond again. It has a mark across it. It is still there. Bucky ate one corner of it two months later, which is a separate matter entirely and which I mind much less, and I have thought about why.

Where the instruction actually sits

Jesus is teaching about prayer and mountains and believing, and then attaches a sentence that seems to come from nowhere.

And when ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have ought against any: that your Father also which is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses. (Mark 11:25)

When ye stand praying. The instruction is located at a particular moment, and the moment is the one where a person is already turned toward God with their hands up.

That placement is the whole teaching. He does not say make an appointment with the person. He does not say wait until you feel differently. He puts it at the exact point where somebody is standing there anyway, which means it is a thing done in a second and in a person's own head.

You are able to do this standing where you already are, and Mark 11:25 puts it inside praying rather than inside a conversation. It is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as an open door rather than as another errand.

And the phrase if ye have ought against any is deliberately loose. Ought means anything at all. It does not distinguish between somebody who meant it and somebody who did not, which is exactly the distinction a person wants to make when the wrecker was doing their best.

You have not been asked to sort out whether it was fair first. The written word covers anything a person has against anybody, and His Spirit is what makes that width a mercy rather than a demand.

The hard case, which is the one where nobody meant it

There is a kind of hurt that is worse to carry than an insult, and it is the kind where nobody did anything wrong.

An insult can be answered. A person can go and have it out and there is something at the other end to have it out with. But when a rooster does the best thing he does across a drawing, there is nothing to do with the feeling, because the feeling is entirely real and there is nowhere to send it.

Paul writes about this in a sentence people usually read as being about tolerance, and it is closer to being about weight.

Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ. (Galatians 6:2)

Bear. It is a carrying word. The instruction assumes there is a weight and does not pretend it is light, and it does not say the weight is anybody's fault.

You are carrying something real and Scripture never once tells you it is nothing. Galatians 6:2 names it as a burden and gives it to be carried rather than to be dismissed, and the Spirit of God is what makes being believed the beginning of putting it down.

And the chapter goes on to say that every man shall bear his own burden a few verses later, which people treat as a contradiction and which is not one. Some things get shared and some things are yours, and knowing which is which is most of the work.

You have been given help with the part that can be shared. Galatians 6:5 keeps a person's own load their own while Galatians 6:2 gives the heavy end to somebody else, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from an apparent contradiction into something a child can feel the sense of.