By Name · Week 1 · Friday · SCREENS
She is sixteen, and her church has split into teams to paint porches on a Saturday. Her team got a little house with a sagging porch and a woman in her eighties who sat in a lawn chair in the yard and talked the whole time.
Early on, she propped her phone against a paint can on the bottom step to film a time-lapse. She got a few clips of herself bringing the woman a glass of water. She was already thinking about the caption.
The woman was watching the camera
About an hour in, she noticed something. The woman was not watching her anymore. She was watching the phone. Fixing her hair. Sitting up straighter in the lawn chair. At one point she asked, is that thing on?
And the girl realized she had turned this woman into a prop. A kind, grateful, eighty-something prop for a video about how kind she was.
“Be careful not to perform your righteous acts before men to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.Matthew 6:1 (BSB)
So when you give to the needy, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by men. Truly I tell you, they already have their full reward.Matthew 6:2 (BSB)
But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing,Matthew 6:3 (BSB)
so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.Matthew 6:4 (BSB)
Jesus is not telling anybody to stop doing good. He is telling them to notice who they are doing it for. If you do it for the crowd, the crowd will pay you. A few hundred likes is real payment. It is just all you get.
She put the phone in her backpack
She did not make a speech about it. She picked up the phone, turned off the time-lapse, and put it in her backpack.
Then she painted, and she listened. She heard about the man who built that porch and the year he built it. She heard about three kids who grew up on those steps, and which step one of them fell off of, and which one of them still calls on Sundays.
What it cost: there is no post. That night a girl from another team posted a video from the same day and everybody liked it. Somebody commented on her own account: where were you today?
She was there. She was on a porch for six hours. Nobody saw it.
If you do it for the crowd, the crowd will pay you. It is just all you get.
Nobody saw it except the woman in the lawn chair, and the Father who sees what is done in secret. I think that is exactly who it was for.
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