Cast It Anyway

This book didn’t cost you anything. Somebody handed it to you, or sent you a link, and you opened it because it was free.

Hold onto that. It’s going to matter before we’re done.

There’s a line in Ecclesiastes that people quote at fundraising banquets without ever reading what sits around it.

“Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days.”

ECCLESIASTES 11:1

Read it slowly and it stops sounding inspirational and starts sounding insane.

Bread and water don’t mix. Bread on water is bread ruined. Throw a loaf into the surf and you don’t get a harvest, you get a mess. Every fisherman in Israel knew that. Every housewife grinding grain knew that. Solomon knew it too, and he said it anyway, which means he meant something the picture only makes sense of once you stand where he stood.

The scholars give us two readings, and I don’t think we have to pick.

The first is commerce. Israel was a trading nation on a trade route, and grain went out on ships. A merchant loaded his best wheat onto a boat and watched the boat disappear over the horizon. No tracking number. No insurance. No way to know if the ship was still afloat by Tuesday. Months later, if the sea behaved and the captain was honest, something came back... and what came back was more than what left. The Hebrew literally reads “send thy bread.” Send it out. Let it go where you can’t follow it.

The second reading is charity. The old rabbis read that verse as giving to people who can’t repay you, and they read the next verse as the instruction for how widely to do it.

“Give a portion to seven, and also to eight; for thou knowest not what evil shall be upon the earth.”

ECCLESIASTES 11:2

Send it out. Send it wide. You don’t know what’s coming.

That’s the same act either way. A man puts something valuable into a current he does not control, and then he waits without a guarantee.

Now look at what Solomon builds around that verse, because this is where the chapter stops being a nice thought and starts being a way to live.

“If the clouds be full of rain, they empty themselves upon the earth.”

ECCLESIASTES 11:3

“He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.”

ECCLESIASTES 11:4

“As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit... even so thou knowest not the works of G-d who maketh all.”

ECCLESIASTES 11:5

“In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand: for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that.”

ECCLESIASTES 11:6

Four times in six verses, Solomon says the same thing. You do not know. You don’t know what evil is coming. You don’t know which way the wind turns. You don’t know how the Spirit moves. You don’t know which seed takes.

And then, having established that you know almost nothing, he tells you to throw your bread in the water.

That isn’t a contradiction. That’s the entire point. Uncertainty is not a reason to hold the loaf. Uncertainty is the exact condition under which the loaf gets thrown.

The farmer who stands at the edge of his field studying the sky never plants anything. He’s not lazy. He’s careful. He’s waiting for conditions that guarantee a return, and because those conditions never arrive, his field stays empty and his barn stays clean and his family stays hungry. Meanwhile the man who sowed in the morning and sowed again in the evening has grain coming up in places he doesn’t even remember planting.

Careful people don’t feed anybody.

I’ve watched believers do this with goodness for twenty years. We wait. We wait until we can afford it. We wait until we’re sure the person deserves it. We wait until we’ve prayed about it long enough to feel released, which is sometimes obedience and is sometimes just a spiritual word for stalling. We wait until we are good enough people to be the kind of person who does that sort of thing.

And here’s what I want to put on the table in this first chapter, because the rest of the book unpacks it.

G-d never asked you to be good. He asked you to do good.

Those are not the same thing, and the difference is not a word game. One is a character rating you can never actually verify, and nobody has ever been able to tell you what score passes. The other is a verb with a body attached to it. One happens inside you where no one can check it. The other happens in a parking lot, at a register, in a waiting room, in a driveway, where somebody feels it.

Goodness is a reputation. Doing good is a decision. You can hold a reputation your whole life without it ever leaving your hands.

Bread that stays on the shelf stays yours. It also stays exactly one loaf.

So this book has a simple argument, and I’ll tell you now instead of making you wait for it. Do good. Everywhere. Always. Not because you are good, and not because it’s safe, and not because you can see where it lands. Do it because it was commanded, because the Kingdom moves that way, and because something comes back that you did not put in the water.

That last part needs a fence around it, and I’ll build that fence properly later. What comes back is not a transaction. This is not karma with a King James accent. You do not put good in a machine and pull a lever and receive a car. Anyone who has done good and been hurt for it knows better, and if that’s you, I’m not going to insult you by pretending the math always works out inside your lifetime.

But scripture keeps saying something returns. “He that watereth shall be watered also himself.” (Proverbs 11:25) “And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.” (Galatians 6:9) After many days, Solomon says. Due season, Paul says. Both of them are telling you the same thing about timing, which is that you don’t set it.

Something comes back. You just don’t get to schedule the tide.

Which brings us back to how this book got into your hands.

It cost you nothing, and that was on purpose. It’s bread, and it’s in the water. I don’t know where it lands, who reads it, what city it ends up in, or what somebody does after they close it. I wrote it and I let it go, which is the only honest way to write a book that says what this one says.

You’re holding the argument and the demonstration at the same time.