There Were Two Apples and I Counted Them Eleven Times

There were two apples in the bowl and there were three of us in the kitchen.

I want to be clear that I did the sum immediately. I did not have to think about it. My dad was doing something at the sink and Rudy was doing his dance in the doorway where he does it, and Bucky had his head in through the window watching the bowl the way he watches any bowl, and I stood there and I counted two apples and three of us, and I counted it again in case the number had changed.

Nobody had said anything. Nobody was even looking at the bowl. I had already had one that morning. And I stood there working out how to be in the kitchen in a way that ended with me having an apple, which is a thing I am not proud of and which took approximately no effort at all to think of.

That is the part I keep coming back to. Nobody taught me that. I was extremely good at it straight away.

The proverb that runs backwards

There is a line in Proverbs that reads like a mistake the first time you see it.

There is that scattereth, and yet increaseth; and there is that withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth to poverty. (Proverbs 11:24)

Scatters, and increases. Withholds, and ends up with less. That is the opposite of how a bowl of apples works, and Proverbs knows it, and says it anyway.

And the next verse:

The liberal soul shall be made fat: and he that watereth shall be watered also himself. (Proverbs 11:25)

Here is the careful part, and it matters because this is where teaching about giving goes wrong most often. This is not a machine. It does not say give an apple and receive two apples. It is not describing a transaction anybody can operate, and whoever turns it into one has stopped reading Proverbs and started selling something.

You are not standing in front of a lever, and Proverbs 11:25 describes a kind of soul rather than a mechanism. It is the Holy Spirit who keeps a verse like that from being turned into an arrangement in a child's head.

What it describes is a kind of person, and what happens to that person over a life.

You have been offered something that happens to a soul rather than something that happens to an apple. Proverbs 11:24 puts increase in a place a person cannot count, and His Spirit is what makes that a thing worth wanting instead of a thing a person is told.

The morning nobody could hoard

There is a stretch in Exodus where God feeds a whole nation daily and builds one rule into it that is worth staring at.

And when they did mete it with an omer, he that gathered much had nothing over, and he that gathered little had no lack; they gathered every man according to his eating. (Exodus 16:18)

Read that carefully. Some people gathered more and some gathered less, which is what people do, and when it was measured out the surplus was gone and the shortfall was gone.

And the other half of the arrangement is that it did not keep. Anything held back overnight spoiled, on purpose, every single day for forty years, which means an entire generation grew up unable to build a store.

You are inside an arrangement where hoarding was never going to work, and Exodus 16:18 says the gatherer of much had nothing over. The Spirit of God is what makes that read as being provided for rather than as being restricted.

Paul quotes that exact verse when he is writing about a collection between churches, which tells you he thought it was about more than bread.

You have been given a pattern for how enough gets spread around. 2 Corinthians 8:15 lifts the manna line into an argument about ordinary generosity, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves it from a desert into a kitchen with a bowl on the table.