The Last of the Firewood

There were nine days of dry wood in the shed on the eleventh of February and February has twenty eight days in it.

That is the whole of the situation and I am going to leave it standing there for a second, because a man who has never been cold in his own house will read that sentence and think it is a figure of speech.

The green wood was in the far shed and it was green. You can burn green wood and it does not warm a room, it just makes the chimney sorry, and I had cut it late because of the wet fall and that was my fault and I knew whose fault it was.

Nine days. Seventeen to find.

On the twelfth, Hollis's daughter in law pulled into the yard in a truck with two small children in the back of it. Their boiler had gone. There was a man coming on Thursday and it was Tuesday, and she did not ask me for wood, she asked me whether I knew anybody who had any, which is what people say.

I gave her four days of it.

I want to describe what four days looks like, because in the moment it is not a noble quantity, it is eleven armfuls carried out to a truck by a man who has already done the arithmetic and knows exactly what he is doing. Toby carried some. Bucky stood in the middle of the yard in the trodden snow the way he does, entirely uninvolved, watching the whole thing.

I had five days of dry wood on the twelfth of February.

And here is where I have to be careful, because I know what a person expects to come next in a story like this, and it is not what happened. Nobody turned up with a load of seasoned ash. There was no knock at the door.

What happened is that it went mild on the seventeenth, which it does about one year in four, and we burned green wood and wore coats in the house for eleven days and it was miserable and completely survivable, and in March I cut early for the following year and I have cut early every year since.

Toby asked me that spring whether I had been worried. I said yes. He asked if I had prayed about it. I said yes. He asked what I prayed, and I told him the truth, which is that I did not ask for wood. I asked to not be the kind of man who counts before he gives.

The instruction is about a hand, and it is specific

Moses gives a law about the poor brother and the language is unusually physical.

But thou shalt open thine hand wide unto him, and shalt surely lend him sufficient for his need, in that which he wanteth. (Deuteronomy 15:8)

Open thine hand wide. Not give what you can spare. Not assess and then respond. The image is a hand, and the hand is described in a particular position, and the position is one a person has to choose because hands do not do it on their own.

And sufficient for his need sets the measure at the other person's requirement rather than at the giver's surplus, which is an uncomfortable place to put a measure and is where it is put.

You are being asked about a hand rather than about a balance, and Deuteronomy 15:8 describes a posture instead of a percentage. It is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as something a person can actually do rather than as an impossible standard.

The verse before it is the one that explains why the instruction is needed at all, and it is about a heart hardening, which is what a person's heart does when it is doing arithmetic in a cold February.

You have not been handed a rule with no understanding of what it costs. The written word names the hardening as the thing to watch, and His Spirit is what makes an old law feel like it was written by somebody who had been cold.

The part that is not a transaction

There is a promise attached in the verses that follow, and it needs handling carefully on a page a child is listening to.

Thou shalt surely give him, and thine heart shall not be grieved when thou givest unto him: because that for this thing the LORD thy God shall bless thee in all thy works, and in all that thou puttest thine hand unto. (Deuteronomy 15:10)

That is a real promise and it is not a mechanism. It does not say the wood comes back. It does not say a truck arrives. It says blessing in all thy works, which is a much broader and much less countable thing, and anybody who turns that verse into an arrangement has misread it and will teach a child a transaction.

I did not get the wood back. I want that on the page in the same paragraph as the verse.

You are not owed a return, and nothing here is a trade. Deuteronomy 15:10 attaches blessing to a life rather than to a ledger, and the Spirit of God is what keeps a promise from turning into a trade.

And the reason given at the end of the passage is not about the giver at all: for the poor shall never cease out of the land. The instruction exists because the situation is permanent, which is a sober and useful thing to tell a child.

You have been given an instruction for a condition that is not going away. Deuteronomy 15:11 says the need is permanent and gives the open hand as the standing answer, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from law into a yard with a truck in it.