The Kindness That Went Thin

She was halfway up the path with a pie in a cloth when she noticed she felt nothing at all.

Not reluctance. Not resentment. Nothing. The way a hand feels after you have been out in the cold without gloves, when you can see it working and cannot feel it doing anything.

She knocked. She was lovely. She sat the two hours and asked all the right questions and did not once look at the clock, and she meant to be there and she was glad to be there in the way a person is glad to be somewhere they have decided to be.

And she walked home down the same path and could not have told you a single thing she had felt.

Here is what she has never said to a living soul.

She is still doing every single one of them.

The dish when there is a death on the road. The card, handwritten, on the day and not the week after. The two hours. The lift to the appointment. The bit of shopping picked up without being asked. She has not dropped one of them, and nobody in this whole valley has the least idea that anything has changed.

The doing is intact. The warmth has drained out of it, quietly, some time in the last couple of years, and she cannot find when.

And what frightens her is a word she has been circling for months and will not say out loud, because she has heard preachers use it, and it is the ugliest word in the language for a woman who has spent forty years doing things for people.

Hypocrite.

She thinks that if the inside is empty then the outside is a costume, and that everybody who has ever been comforted by her at a door has been comforted by a costume.

If your kindness has gone thin while your hands kept moving, come on in and sit near the fire. Somebody else has poured the tea and it is going cold anyway.

What is in that verse, and where the comma is

There is a definition of love that everybody has heard at weddings, and the very first thing it says is not the thing anybody remembers.

Charity suffereth long, and is kind.1 Corinthians 13:4

Long suffering. That is the first item. Before patience, before humility, before any of the beautiful lines further down, the definition opens with a word about enduring something that goes on and on.

And then a comma. And then kind.

There is nothing in between them. No stage, no gap, no condition. It does not say charity suffereth long, and then, once it has come through the far side of that, is kind. The two sit in one clause, at the same time, in the same person.

Which describes exactly one kind of woman. The kind who is aching and keeps on being kind while she aches.

You are the woman that clause was written to describe, and the aching is inside the definition rather than a disqualification from it. 1 Corinthians 13:4 puts the long suffering and the kindness in a single line with only a comma between them, and the Holy Spirit kept them joined rather than sequenced, which means the two hours you sat this week were love by the Bible's own account and not by a generous reading of it.

The word she will not say

Now the word, because it has been sitting under the fire this whole time and it is not going to be dealt with by being avoided.

A hypocrite, in the language the New Testament uses, is a stage actor. Somebody playing a part for an audience, for effect, to be thought of a certain way.

That is not a woman going up a path with a pie in a cloth and feeling nothing and going anyway.

There is no audience in that. Nobody knows. There is no effect being produced, and there is nobody watching to be impressed, and there is no benefit coming back to her from any of it.

You have been doing the opposite of what that word means, and it has never once applied to you. Matthew 6:1 warns against doing alms to be seen of men and puts the whole weight on the being seen, and it is written about performance rather than about a heart that has gone quiet, and it is the same Spirit who searches the deep things and has been reading yours all the way down the path.

An actor stops when the audience leaves. You have been keeping every single one of them with nobody watching at all.

What actually happened to the warmth

Let us look at the thin place itself, and let us not tidy it.

Something has been going on for a long time in your life that has not turned, and a person carrying a long wait does not get to keep every feeling in working order. Feeling is not an unlimited supply. It thins where the weight sits longest.

You were not becoming a smaller woman during those years, and the thinning is what wear looks like rather than what character looks like. Psalm 6:6 has a man saying he is weary with his groaning and that he waters his couch with his tears, and it is written into the songbook without one word of correction attached, and the Spirit who kept that line available is the same one producing longsuffering as fruit in a person during the wait and not after it.

Nothing here says the wait ends and nothing here puts a season on it. What is said is that the thin place is not a moral failure, and that your hands have gone on being right while your feelings went quiet.