Hard Hearts and Open Hands

The end of a long day and some peace with a slice of pie with a good book felt like the perfect evening. So I took myself to a favorite restaurant, asked for the quietest spot, and slipped into the perfect booth.

The waitress came up, menu in hand. We chatted and, together, made my pie choice. Her humor and positive attitude was an unexpected bonus to the evening.

So, I opened my book and settled back to enjoy.

The book wasn’t a personal choice. Our little reading group had decided on the title and author for our next meeting. Something with true stories in it, we decided. Loving narratives myself, I was looking forward to the reading.

Before long, however, I realized that these narratives were anything but soothing. Each chapter featured a different character, a woman with children. They existed on the very edge. Poorly paid jobs required long hours and elaborate arrangements for daycare and travel.  The difficulties of their lives left them mostly exhausted. But they were managing, and even hopeful.

My pie came. I paused to take the first fork full.

Then, back to the stories. Varying disasters sent all of these women and children into homelessness. The reasons were many: eviction because of gentrification; a house fire; car trouble; cancer diagnosis. The first problem led to the next one in cascading effect. The women worked for hours, days, years to find any way that might lead to something more hopeful for their children.

By this time, my pie was cold and I was not so comfortable in my quiet booth.

While several themes were emerging from these stories, one caught my heart. No matter how hard these women worked, wages were never enough. Meanwhile, ready sources of emergency cash had been removed through welfare reform; for-profit investors had decimated affordable housing possibilities.

Certainly, better ways of providing for those basics must be available. The Lord was pretty insistent about his people’s responsibility to the “widows, orphans, foreigners, and poor.” Did he have any guidance for how to live so that flourishing for all was possible?

My thoughts went to the most basic requirement in the Lord’s agrarian economics: gleaning. The fatherless and foreigners had the right to harvest the remainders of the crop. Correspondingly, the landowner had the responsibility of making sure that he left enough for the poor to gather. Righteous Boaz maintained that system; Jesus and his disciples benefitted from it. So I wondered how this model might work a system made up of wages and investments. How would a version of “gleaning” have changed the lives of the women in my book?

Most startling, however, was another requirement. Each year, God’s people were to collect tithes based on every agricultural product. Every third year, the tithe was to remain in the villages and stored for the benefit of the “foreigners, the fatherless and the widows.”    

Food banks specifically for the poor and funded by the community, then, was the model mandated by the Lord. How would that concept of righteous living have made a difference to the women and children in the stories I was reading? 

The Lord, however, also understood that no human system works perfectly. So, he insisted on open-handed generosity to fill in the gaps. When that help comes in the form of a loan, the loan itself was to be forgiven every seventh year. 

Stories demonstrate principles; stories don’t dictate methods. Consistently, God promises blessing when the principles are practiced.  When his people aren’t faithfully living these basic ideas, The Lord calls them hard-hearted.

My last bit of pie was long gone. The waitress saw that I was no longer turning pages but sitting motionless, in thought and pain of heart. So she came with the bill.

“What are you reading?” she asked.

“A really good book,” I responded, not quite knowing what to say.  So I just read out the title, “Here is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America.”

She paused and then put the bill on my table. “Oh,” she laughed and shrugged.  “I guess I’m one of those people.  I’m homeless.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” she said, averting her eyes.  “I’ve been in rehab. Now I’m in temporary housing  But I’m working and saving my tips so, I can have a place.”

Numbly, I signed my credit card statement. She walked away.

After a minute, I reached for my wallet and pulled out a twenty. On my way out, I stopped beside her and put my tip into her hand.

“From my heart to your hand, “ I said.  

Such a tiny scrap of hope.  

So much modern hard-heartedness.