The Word Especially

She is the fairest person anybody in that hall has ever met and it is starting to be a problem.

It shows up in small ways and it has for years. She will not let anybody have two of something if there are people who have none. She keeps the list in strict order and she will not move a name up it, ever, for anybody, including for the woman whose situation everybody knows about, because a list that can be moved is not a list.

She is right about all of that and it is why the whole operation works and why nobody has ever once questioned where anything went.

She is forty four.

And on Saturday somebody she has known for eleven years, who works beside her every week, said something in passing about a thing that has happened in her own family, and it was serious, and it had happened three weeks earlier, and she found out about it standing next to a box of tinned goods.

She said the right things. She was warm.

And what she has not been able to shake since is not hurt about being told late. It is a sentence that arrived on the way home and would not leave: I do not know who my people are.

She gives everybody the same. Exactly the same. That is her whole practice and she has been proud of it. And the effect of it, which she has never seen before Saturday, is that nobody is first, and if nobody is first then nobody quite knows they are hers, including the woman who works beside her, including her own sister, including, she suspects, her own household.

The light in that hall on a Saturday afternoon comes through the high windows in bars, and she stood in it with a clipboard she had stopped writing on.

There is a sentence at the end of Galatians that has a word in the middle of it that she has read a hundred times and never once seen.

Especially unto them who are of the household of faith

I have to be careful here, and considerably more careful than usual, because this is where somebody normally hands over a rebuke. Charity begins at home. She has neglected her own. I am not going to do that. A woman who has run a fair operation for eleven years has not neglected anybody, and turning her own household into an accusation would be both false and cruel.

Paul writes: As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith (Galatians 6:10).

Read the shape of it. Do good unto all men, which is the wide instruction and it is not being reduced by anything that follows.

And then: especially.

That word is not a comparison and it is not a ranking of worth. It is an ordering. Paul does not say do less for all men. He says there is a category that comes first, and he names it, and the category is the people near you in the faith.

You have been given a first, and having a first is not unfairness. That is not me smuggling favoritism into the verse; Galatians 6:10 keeps the all men in place and adds an especially, and the Holy Spirit who carried that into the letter did not treat the two as being in tension.

And notice the word household in the second half. Not everybody, not the world, not the list. A household, which is a word about proximity: the people who are actually around a person.

As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith.Galatians 6:10

What an even measure costs

Now the thing she saw for the first time on Saturday, because it is exact and it is not a moral failure.

An even measure is fair. It is also, and this is the part nobody says, a way of never having to decide who your people are.

If everybody gets the same, no one has to be named. And if no one is named, then nobody in a person's life ever finds out that they are first, and the woman who works beside her every week has been operating on a rational assumption, which is that she is one of many and that her news can wait three weeks.

That assumption was not unkind. It was accurate, given the evidence available.

You have never had to make anybody less in order to make somebody first. Galatians 6:10 holds all men and especially in one sentence without difficulty, and the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) did not require an even measure in order to be just.

This is yours right now, in a hall with the light in bars: an ordering that Scripture itself supplies. Galatians 6:10 puts the especially in the verse; the Spirit who inspired that line did not leave the order to be worked out by conscience alone.

And if the household is small

Let me say the thing that this subject always skips, because the word household will land differently depending on who is reading it.

If your household is one person, the verse is not smaller for you. The word Paul uses is about the people near you in the faith, and near is doing the work: whoever is actually around, whoever would come, whoever you would call.

A woman living alone has a household of faith by that definition, and the especially applies to it in full. The instruction is not about who lives at your address. It is about who is close, and who therefore comes first.

You have a first, whatever the shape of the house is. Psalm 68:6 says God sets the solitary in families, and the setting is His action; the Holy Spirit who inspired that line put the placing on God rather than on an arrangement.

Fruit is not output, and a strictly ordered list is where the difference is sharpest. Output is the operation: fair, auditable, and genuinely good. Fruit is what grows between people who know that they are somebody's first, and John 15:4 says the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, and it does not say the fruit is distributed evenly.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. On the walk home you take anyway, tell Him one true thing about Saturday with nothing asked for and no system attached. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody audits that.