Open Hands · Week 4 · Friday · HURT
The invoice on his desk is dated two years ago and he is owed every cent of it.
The short version is that his partner was taking work out the side door while they were still partners, and he found out the way people always find out, from somebody who assumed he already knew and mentioned it in passing. The partnership came apart over about nine months. The invoice is the last loose piece of it. A lawyer has looked at the paperwork and told him he would probably win.
I want to be clear that this is not a story about a misunderstanding. He was wronged, on purpose, by a man who knew what he was doing, and the money is real and it is his.
Debts, Not Feelings About Debts
There is a line we say out loud in church most weeks and I am not sure we hear it.
And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.Matthew 6:12 (BSB)
Debts. The word is financial and the people hearing it first would have heard it that way. Not our bad feelings about our debtors, and not our general attitude toward them. The thing that is owed.
And then there is the one in the Sermon on the Mount that has bothered me for about twenty years, which I think is the correct response to it.
if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well;Matthew 5:40 (BSB)
Read who is in that sentence. The other person is in the wrong. Jesus is not describing a mix-up where both sides have a point. Somebody is coming after you for something that is not theirs, and the instruction is not to make sure the claim is adjudicated fairly. It is to let it go, and then hand over more.
Jesus knows the person in that sentence is in the wrong. He says let them have it anyway.
Now, I am not telling you to eat every debt you are owed, and I do not read that passage as a rule for every situation a person can be in. There are people for whom paying what they owe is the only road back to being someone who can be trusted, and waving it away is not a kindness to them. Wisdom is involved. But I notice that most of the time I reach for wisdom here, what I am actually reaching for is a reason, and I should be honest about which one is driving.
What It Cost
He told the lawyer to stop.
No letter to the partner, no final conversation, no explanation of what he was doing and why, which I think was the right call; a forgiveness you announce is at least partly an invoice of a different kind.
That is real money out of a real household with a real mortgage in it. His wife knows and supports it and also, by his own account, had a couple of rough days about it, which seems about right to me.
He is not serene about this. He told me that some weeks he adds up what that money would have done, and he can tell you the figure, and he knows which room in his house it would have gone into.
So he has not stopped wanting it. He has stopped pursuing it. Those are different and only one of them was ever available to him.
The invoice is still in the drawer. He says he is not sure why he keeps it, and that throwing it away felt like a bigger statement than he wanted to make. It stops with him. That is the whole of what he has to show for it.
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