I Borrowed From My Sister Last Time

In March it was the tires and Ronni borrowed from her sister.

It was not a dramatic conversation. Kim said yes before Ronni had finished the sentence, and there was no interest and no terms and no date, and Ronni paid it back over five months in bits, and Kim never once asked about it and told her twice to stop worrying.

That is a good sister. That is not a story about a hard loan.

It is September and it is the exhaust and the number is bigger than March.

And Ronni has decided, entirely on her own, without one word being said by anybody, that she cannot ask again.

Now I want to be careful here, because the deciding is understandable and I am not going to be flippant about it.

Asking twice is a different thing from asking once. Once is a bad month. Twice starts to be a pattern, and a pattern is a thing a person becomes in somebody else's eyes, and Ronni cannot bear the idea of being a thing in her sister's eyes.

So the door shut. In her head, in about a second, sometime on the Wednesday.

Here is the part that matters, though, and it is not about Kim at all.

When that door shut, something else happened, and nobody noticed it happening. Ronni stopped looking.

Because for five months, the answer to "what happens if it goes wrong" had been Kim. And when Kim came off the list, the list did not go down to four items. It went to zero.

That is not logic. That is what happens when one option has been doing the work of all of them.

Her friend at work asked on Thursday how it was going and Ronni said, "Yeah, we're figuring it out."

There is no we. There is one woman and no plan and a car in a lot.

One door closed is not a house with no doors

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

I am not going to tell you that the money will come. Nobody can honestly say that and being told it and then not receiving it does more harm than never hearing it. I am not going to suggest that a particular prayer produces a particular sum, because that is not true and it lands hardest on the people who most need it not to be a lie. And I am not going to tell you to call your sister, because that is yours to decide and you know that relationship and I do not.

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 moment the list went to zero.

You have not run out of sources, and Scripture says God shall supply all your need according to His riches in glory. Philippians 4 measures the supply against His riches rather than against what is left in a person's own account, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that a fact about the evening a list finally read zero.

Here is a verse everybody half knows, and the half that gets left off is the half that does the work.

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth.Psalm 121:1-2

Most people stop after the hills.

But look at the two lines together, because there is a movement in them. The first line is a person scanning the horizon. Looking up at the hills, which in that world is where the trouble comes from and also where the roads go and where the help might appear.

And then the second line arrives and moves the source. My help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth.

Not from the hills. From the One who made them.

That is not a rejection of the hills. The help still often arrives over a hill, through a road, in a person, in a phone call. What the psalm does is move the source off the scenery and onto God, which means the supply is not limited to the places a person happens to be able to see from where they are standing.

You are not out of options, and Scripture puts the source of help outside the horizon a person is scanning. It is written that my help cometh from the Lord which made heaven and earth, which moves the supply off the visible hills entirely, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a practical fact rather than a poetic one.

You have been looking at one hill since March, and the passage never once limited the help to the road a person already knows. Psalm 121 names the maker of heaven and earth as the source, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that a reason to start looking again rather than a reason to stop.

Write four, even the unlikely ones

Here is the practical thing, and it is a piece of paper.

When one option has been carrying the whole load and it comes off, a person does not experience that as losing one. They experience it as losing everything, because they were not holding a list. They were holding a name.

So the job is to build a list, which means writing down four places help could come from, and writing all four even though at least two will be embarrassing to write.

Not a plan. Not a decision. Four possibilities on a piece of paper.

They might be: the garage's own payment arrangement, which most places have and few people ask about. A credit union or a small local lender. A church benevolence fund, which exists in more churches than anybody realizes and which almost nobody uses. Selling something. A different friend. A different sister. Doing the urgent half now and the rest in November. Asking Kim, which is allowed to be on the list even if it is not used.

The point is not that one of them is the answer. The point is that a woman holding four possibilities is a different woman from one holding zero, and the difference is one piece of paper and eleven minutes.

You have permission to write down things that might not work, and no part of the written word requires a person to know the answer before they are allowed to look. Psalm 121 has the lifting of the eyes happen before any help is in sight, and the Spirit of God is what makes an honest list an act of looking up rather than a scramble.

And here is the tender half, and it is about Kim.

The reason the door shut so fast is love. Not pride, whatever it feels like. It shut because Ronni would rather carry a hard September than become a certain thing in her sister's mind, and that is a costly and unselfish instinct.

But it was decided in one second, on a Wednesday, without Kim in the room, and Kim was given no say in it at all.

You were never appointed to make that decision on somebody else's behalf, and Scripture puts the bearing of burdens between two people rather than inside one. It is written to bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ, which is Galatians 6 requiring somebody willing to be carried, and His Spirit is what makes a person's offer a thing they get to make for themselves.