The Invitation Left on the Doormat

For the one who finds a kind card on the mat and feels a bill arrive with it.

Picture a card on a doormat at about four in the afternoon, printed on decent stock, with a hand written line at the bottom in blue ink.

The printed part is a Sunday invitation with a time on it and a street name you know perfectly well, because you drove past it twice last week. The hand written part says that they think about you, and that there's no pressure at all. It's signed with a first name and a small drawing of nothing in particular.

It's been on the mat since lunchtime and you've walked past it twice.

The first time you were carrying shopping. The second time you weren't carrying anything at all, which is the one that tells you something.

The third time you pick it up and read it properly, and the thing that arrives is not warmth. It is the feeling of receiving a bill. Something is now owed. A decision has been placed in your hands and you are going to have to produce one.

By the evening the card is behind the kettle, face down, which is where a piece of paper goes when you have decided to deal with it later and know perfectly well that you will not.

The kindness on that card is yours to receive, and it was never an invoice. It is written that that your speech is to be seasoned with grace, and the Spirit gives you the answer when one is actually needed.

Kindness and Obligation Are Not the Same Post

Separate the two, because they arrived in the same envelope and you have been treating them as one item.

The kindness is real. Somebody wrote a line in blue ink, walked to your door, and left it without ringing the bell so that you would not have to have a conversation about it. That is a thoughtful act performed by a person who was thinking about you.

The obligation isn't in the card. Read it again and see. There's no request for a reply, no date by which you must respond, and an explicit line saying there's no pressure.

Go through it word by word if you need to. There are perhaps forty words on it, and not one of them asks you for anything. That's a remarkable piece of restraint by somebody who clearly wanted to write more.

You supplied the invoice. It came out of you the moment you read the words, and it attached itself to a card that does not contain one.

The card carried kindness and you added the invoice yourself. The written word tells you how to answer when an answer is wanted, and the Spirit does not bill you for being thought about.

Seasoned With Salt

Here is the verse, and what it asks for is smaller and warmer than what you have been attempting.

Let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man.Colossians 4:6 (KJV)

Seasoned with salt. Salt is a small quantity that changes a dish, and it is never the dish itself. Paul is describing an answer that is brief, warm, and has some savor to it, rather than a complete account of your position.

Notice also the promise at the end. That ye may know how ye ought to answer. The knowing is given rather than manufactured in advance, which means you're not required to have the answer prepared before the moment arrives.

That's the opposite of how most believers approach this. We assemble the position first and hope it holds. Paul describes somebody who doesn't have the words yet, is not anxious about it, and receives them at the point of need.

Paul said that to believers surrounded by people who asked them difficult questions constantly, and it carries over to a card behind a kettle.

You are promised the answer at the moment rather than before it. The written word says you will know how you ought to answer, and the Spirit is the one who supplies it.

What a Thank You Is

Consider the smallest possible response, because you have not considered it at all.

You have been weighing two options. Go, which you do not want to do and are not ready for. Or explain why not, which means producing the whole account for somebody who did not ask for it.

There is a third, and it is the one the verse describes. Thank them. Four sentences, warm, no decision in it, no explanation, no date. Say that it was kind of them to think of you and that it meant something to find it on the mat.

That's a complete and honest response to what was actually sent. It answers the kindness, which is the part that was real, and it declines to answer the invoice, which was never enclosed.

You can do that today. It'll take four minutes and it doesn't commit you to a single thing, and the person who wrote in blue ink will be glad for the rest of the week.

A thank you answers the kindness without paying an invoice nobody sent. The written word asks for grace and savor rather than a full account, and the Spirit makes four warm sentences enough.

I Am Not Telling You Not to Go

Be plain, because this could be read as an argument against the invitation itself.

You might go. Not this Sunday, and perhaps not this year, but you might, and if a door opens that is right for you then go through it gladly. I am not building you a case against ever walking into a room again.

Nor am I telling you the sender had no hope in it. They probably did. People who write that line in blue ink usually hope. Hoping is not the same as billing you.

What I want off you is the debt. Not the door. Not the person who walked to it.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Amir This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.