Two Coats and One of Them Fit Somebody Else

There is a peg by our back door and there were two coats on it, and one of them was mine and the other one was also mine.

I found this out in November when Bucky pulled the whole lot off the peg looking for something in a pocket, and everything went on the floor, and my dad picked it all up and stood there for a second holding two coats and said, whose is this one.

It was mine. It had been mine since the year before. It still fit, more or less, because I have not grown much, and the only reason I was not wearing it is that the other one is better and I had been wearing the better one since about February.

A whole year. A coat had been on a peg in a cold house for a whole year and I had walked past it about six hundred times.

That is the part I want to say plainly, because people talk about sharing as if the hard bit is the giving. It was not the giving. The giving took four minutes. The hard part is that I had genuinely never counted, not once, and if he had not pulled the pegs down I would still not have counted.

We took it to the church box on the Sunday. Dad did not make me and he did not say anything about what a good thing it was, he just said, that one, and I said yes, and it went in the truck.

I want to be honest about one more thing. On the way there I did think, briefly, that it would be quite useful to have a spare in case something happened to the good one. I did think that. And then I thought about the fact that I had thought it, and about how much a person can want a thing they have not touched in a year the second somebody is about to take it.

I have thought about the peg a lot since. There are other pegs in this house.

The crowd asks and the answer is small

People come out to John in the wilderness and they ask him a large question, and what they get back is not large at all.

He answereth and saith unto them, He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none; and he that hath meat, let him do likewise. (Luke 3:11)

The question was what shall we do then? It is a serious question asked by serious people who have walked a long way, and it deserves a serious answer, and this is the answer.

Two coats. Not everything you own. Not a life of poverty. The instruction is arithmetic that a child can do, and the object in it is a coat, and the standard is that somebody else has none.

You are being given something small enough to actually do, and Luke 3:11 keeps the whole instruction to a number and a coat. It is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as an opening rather than as a disappointment.

The people who come after get answers of the same size. Tax collectors are told to collect only what is appointed. Soldiers are told not to shake anybody down and to be content with their pay. Nobody is told to leave their job.

You have not been asked for a different life, and every answer in that passage is about the one somebody is already living. The written word keeps the whole thing inside ordinary work, and His Spirit is what makes that a relief instead of an anticlimax.

The counting is the part nobody mentions

There is a moment in the gospels where a woman is watched putting money into a treasury, and the thing being measured is not the amount.

For all these have of their abundance cast in unto the offerings of God: but she of her penury hath cast in all the living that she had. (Luke 21:4)

Of their abundance. That phrase is doing something quiet and hard. It is not saying the wealthy people gave badly. It is saying they gave from a place where they did not have to count, and she gave from a place where she knew every coin she had.

Which means that not counting is the actual condition being described. A person with a spare coat on a peg for a year is not wicked. They are in abundance, in the exact sense Luke uses, and the sign of it is not selfishness, it is that they had not noticed.

You are being invited to look rather than to feel bad, and Luke 21:4 names the not counting rather than the not caring. The Spirit of God is what makes that diagnosis feel like help instead of like an accusation.

And He was sitting opposite the treasury watching, which is the detail Mark keeps. Somebody was paying attention to something nobody else in that room registered as an event.

You have been watched by somebody who notices what the room does not. Mark 12:41 has Him sitting and beholding, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from a temple courtyard into a house with pegs in it.