After Many Days

I owe you a fence.

Back in chapter one I said this book carries a promise on the cover, and that the promise needed a fence built around it before anybody got hurt on it. Because good comes back. It’s on the shirt. It’s in the title. And if I hand you that line without the fence, some of you are going to do good for two years, get nothing, and quietly conclude that G-d is a liar.

So here’s the whole thing in one line, and then I’ll build it out.

The return is not the reason. It’s the residue.

Residue is what’s left on the pan. It’s what the work leaves behind. Nobody cooks in order to get residue and nobody plants a field in order to get dirt under his nails, but you cannot do the thing without it showing up. It is real, it is not the point, and the moment you make it the point you’ve stopped doing the thing and started running a transaction.

Now the text that says it better than I just did.

Start with the verse people misuse worse than any other verse in American Christianity.

“Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again.”

LUKE 6:38

You’ve heard that verse read over an offering bucket more times than you can count.

Now read three verses up, in the same paragraph, out of the same mouth.

“But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil.”

LUKE 6:35

Do good, hoping for nothing again. And your reward shall be great.

Both. In one sentence. Jesus promises the return and then forbids you to do it for the return, and He does it without pausing, because He does not see a contradiction there.

That is residue, stated by Him, three verses above the verse we stole.

And look at the last line of 35. He is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil. That’s CHRESTOS again, the same word from Romans 2:4, the one that leads a man to repentance. G-d does good to people who never say thank you, and He has been doing it a lot longer than you have.

So let me be exact about what kind of thing a residue is, because four wrong ideas attach themselves to it.

One. It is not karma.

Karma is a machine. You put in, the machine owes you, the machine pays. It has no face, no discretion, and no capacity to know what would destroy you if you actually got it.

This is a Father. A Father is not a machine. A Father gives, and sometimes a Father withholds, and the withholding is not a malfunction. A machine owes you. A Father decides.

If you want a G-d who owes you, you don’t want a Father. You want a vending machine with better theology.

Two. It does not come back in kind.

Solomon said you’ll find it. He never said you’ll find the same loaf. Feed somebody and you may not get fed. You may get a door opened in a city you’ve never been to, by a person you’ve never met, twenty years later, for reasons nobody can trace.

If you’re standing there with a receipt waiting for matching change, you’ll miss the actual return while it’s happening.

Three. You don’t set the clock.

After many days, Solomon says. Due season, Paul says. Nobody ever says this quarter.

“And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.”

GALATIANS 6:9

See what the harvest is conditioned on in that verse. Not the quality of your seed. Not your technique. If we faint not. The one variable Paul names is whether you were still doing it when the season came.

Four. Sometimes it does not come back in your lifetime, and I won’t lie to you about that.

Hebrews runs through the great list of the faithful and then says this about all of them.

“These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.”

HEBREWS 11:13

Died in faith. Did not receive. That’s in the Bible, in the chapter we teach as the hall of fame. And the word he lands on is pilgrims. People passing through, who threw bread into water and never saw the far side of it.

So if you have done good and bled for it, I’m not going to insult you with arithmetic. Some of you gave a man a job and he stole from the register. Some of you took somebody in and they lied about you on the way out. Some of you have fed and given and covered for twenty years and your own house is still hard.

Scripture does not say that didn’t happen. Scripture says the water is bigger than your line of sight.

Now let me say what the residue actually looks like, because naming four things it isn’t leaves you holding nothing.

Read the verse right after the bread verse. “Give a portion to seven, and also to eight; for thou knowest not what evil shall be upon the earth.” (Ecclesiastes 11:2)

Give it to seven. Give it to eight. And the reason he gives is the trouble you can’t see coming.

That is not a promise of profit. That’s a description of what a life looks like when the hard thing finally arrives. Solomon is telling you to send it out wider than makes sense, precisely because you cannot see what’s ahead.

And when it comes, here is what has come back. You are standing in a place where eight people owe you nothing and would come anyway.

Nobody builds that. It accumulates. It’s residue, and it grew in a field you forgot you planted.

I kept the boomerang on the logo, and I’ll tell you where the picture breaks.

A boomerang returns to the hand that threw it. That’s the whole appeal of the image, and it’s the part that isn’t true. Bread on the water does not come back to your hand. It goes downstream. It feeds somebody you will never meet. What returns to you comes by a different current, on a different day, usually carried by someone who has no idea they’re delivering it.

It’s a good logo. It’s an incomplete theology. Solomon’s picture is better, and Solomon’s picture requires you to lose sight of the loaf.

Which brings us to the third word.

Always.

Do Good. Everywhere. Always.

Do is a verb you can start. Everywhere is a map you can learn. Always is the one that actually costs, because always means the morning after nothing came back.

“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, or whether they both shall be alike good.”

ECCLESIASTES 11:6

Two sowings in one day. He does not tell you to check the morning seed before you plant the evening one. He tells you to plant twice and stay ignorant about both.

Always is what separates this from a campaign. Anybody can do good for a season. A season is a program, and programs end, and somebody puts out a report with numbers in it. Always is not a program. Always is what your hands do now, including on the days it produced nothing, including for people who didn’t deserve it, including after somebody burned you for it last spring.

He is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil. If you’re going to look like your Father, that is the part you’re going to look like.

So we’re back where we started.

This book cost you nothing. Somebody handed it to you or sent you a link, and you opened it because it was free.

I told you at the beginning to hold onto that, and here’s why.

It was bread, and I put it in the water. I have no idea where you’re reading this, what city you’re in, what your week has been, or what you’ll do in the next ten minutes. I let it go. That was the only honest way to write a book that says what this one says.

And now the water is you.