Asking For Time Was The Hard Part

Malia asked, and they said yes, and it took about forty seconds.

She had gone in expecting to hear a number and pay it. The number came and she could not pay it, not in one go, not that week, and there was a pause at the counter while she worked out what to do with her face.

And then she said it. She said, "Is there any way I could do half now and half next month?"

And the woman behind the counter said, "Yeah, of course. I'll do you a note."

Forty seconds. No hesitation, no raised eyebrow, no consultation with anybody in a back office. It was a completely ordinary transaction for that woman and she had probably done four of them that week.

Malia said thank you twice, and paid the half, and drove home.

And here is the thing that has stayed with her, five days later, and that she has not been able to explain to anybody.

The paying was fine.

The asking cost her more than the money did.

She can still feel the shape of that pause at the counter. She can feel the specific effort of getting the sentence out, the way it required a decision somewhere in her chest before it required anything of her mouth. And she has thought about it, on and off, ever since, and it has taken up a great deal more of her week than a payment ever could have.

She has not told her mother. She has not told her sister. She has told nobody, because telling somebody would mean saying the sentence again, out loud, in a room, and describing herself as a person who asked.

Her friend said on the phone, "Did you get the car sorted?"

And Malia said, "Yeah, all done."

Which is true, and which leaves out the whole story.

What the asking actually was

Let me put down what I am not doing, so nothing has to brace.

I am not going to tell you that money will come easier next time. I do not know that and nobody does. I am not going to suggest that praying a particular way makes an amount appear, because that is not true and it is a cruel thing to hand somebody who then does not receive it. And I am not going to tell you what that woman behind the counter was thinking, because I was not there and neither were you, in the sense that matters: what a person sees on somebody else's face is almost never what is actually on it. What the car itself needed was a matter for somebody qualified, and it got handed to them, and that part went fine.

And one plain thing first. Money trouble takes some people somewhere much darker than a repair bill. If it has gone there, if there are thoughts in it about not being here, tell a person today: a friend, a sister, a doctor, or the 988 crisis line for anyone in the United States. That is not a detour from this message. It is the most important line in it.

What I want to look at is the fee.

Because Malia paid twice for that repair. She paid the half at the counter, which was the actual price. And she paid a second thing, somewhere in her chest, in the second and a half before the sentence came out, and she has been paying installments on that one every day since.

And nobody charged her for the second one. She set that price herself.

You have never once been charged by God for asking, and Scripture has Him waiting in order to be gracious. It is written in Isaiah 30 that the LORD waiteth, that He may be gracious unto you, which puts Him on the near side of a request rather than behind a fee, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a fact about a woman who set her own price and then paid it.

Now, here is the verse, and it is about coming to ask.

Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.Hebrews 4:16

Look at the word boldly and then look at where the writer puts it.

He does not say come boldly once a person has something to offer. He does not say come boldly if the need was nobody's own fault. He says come boldly to the throne of grace, and the purpose named is obtaining mercy and finding help in time of need.

The whole address is designed for people who arrive with a need and nothing else. That is the traffic that place was built for.

And the posture prescribed is not apology. It is boldness. Which is a strange word to use about asking for help, unless the writer means exactly what he says, which is that asking here is not a lesser act.

You are not somebody who had to beg, and Scripture assigns boldness to the one who comes with nothing but a need. It is written to come boldly unto the throne of grace to obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need, which makes the asking the intended use rather than an exception, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a fact about a counter as well as a throne.

You have been treating an ordinary act as a humiliation, and the passage gives it the opposite name. Hebrews 4 calls it boldness rather than begging, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that naming stick to a woman who said fifteen words to a stranger on a Tuesday.

Naming it correctly changes what it costs

Here is the thing I most want to hand you, and it is not comfort. It is accuracy.

What Malia did at that counter was one of the more competent things a person does in an ordinary year.

She heard a figure she could not meet. She did not panic, and she did not run, and she did not say yes to something she could not do, which is what a great many people do and then lie awake about. Instead, in real time, under pressure, in public, she constructed a workable alternative and proposed it.

That is not weakness with a nice name on it. That is what a capable adult does. It is exactly what a business owner does with a supplier, and it is exactly what a landlord does with a bank, and nobody calls either of those begging.

The difference is not the act. The difference is that she was on her own and it was her own money and there was nobody there to tell her the name for what she had just done.

So here is the name. That was negotiating. It was dignity, and it was skill, and it worked in forty seconds.

You have a skill you have been calling a failure, and no verse anywhere ranks a person by whether they could pay in one go. Hebrews 4 names the coming as bold and the receiving as mercy, which are both honorable words, and the Spirit of God is what makes an accurate name land deeper than a kind one.

And I want to say the tender half, because it explains the whole thing.

The reason the asking was hard is not that Malia thinks poorly of people who ask. She would be the first person to tell a friend to ask, and she would mean it, and she would think nothing whatsoever of that friend afterward.

The rule only applies to her. That is how it always works.

You were never held to a standard God set, and Scripture invites the same coming from everybody without a separate rule for anybody. It is written to come boldly to obtain mercy in time of need, which contains no clause excluding the one asking, and His Spirit is what makes that even handedness true of a woman about herself.