The Key Stayed Under The Brick

There is a food pantry in a church basement on Clay Street that opens at four on Thursdays, and it has been run for nine years by two women who do not agree.

Verna Oyelaran and Marguerite Doss.

I am not going to tell you what they disagree about. I want to be plain that this is deliberate, because the moment I name it you will start deciding which of them is right, and that is the one thing this message is not for.

What matters is the shape of it. It is not a misunderstanding. It is not something a long evening and good faith would dissolve. Both of them have thought about it carefully for decades, both of them hold it at full weight, and they cannot both be correct. Nine years in, neither has moved, and neither of them expects the other to.

There is one key to the outside basement door.

It lives under a loose brick at the bottom of the back step, third from the left, and it has lived there since before either of them started. Whoever gets there first opens up.

In nine years, neither woman has taken that key home.

Think about what that would have cost. A key in a coat pocket is a small thing and there are a hundred honest reasons for it. Rain gets in. Kids play on that step. The lock sticks in the cold and it would be easier to be the one who always deals with it. Any of those would have worked, and neither of them ever once reached for one.

They quarrel, incidentally. About the crates, about whether the beans go on the low shelf, about the woman who comes at ten to four every week and whether that is early. They are not gentle with each other and neither has ever wanted the other to be.

Then one February, ice on everything, Marguerite was late.

Verna got the door open in the dark and the wind was coming down the alley off the river and she had the key in her hand and her hand already in her coat pocket, warm, and she stopped.

She crouched down on the bottom step in the cold, lifted the brick, put the key underneath it, and set the brick back down. Because Marguerite was coming.

And then she stayed there, crouched, with her hand flat on the brick, longer than she needed to.

Because she had been telling herself for nine years that the two of them tolerated each other. She had said the word out loud to her sister. We tolerate each other. It works.

Toleration does not put the key back.

Four hundred and some Thursdays, two women who cannot both be right, and every single week, both of them, without discussing it once, leaving the way in where the other one could find it.

Marguerite's headlights came up the alley. Verna stood up with her knees complaining and went in to turn the lights on, and she did not say anything about it then, and she has not said anything about it since.

Fully persuaded in his own mind

Paul is writing to a church in Rome that is arguing, and he does something with his authority that is almost unbelievable.

One man esteemeth one day above another: another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind.Romans 14:5

He does not settle it.

Sit with how strange that is. This is an apostle. He has settled harder questions than this one in shorter letters. The Roman believers would have taken his ruling and the argument would have been over by the next reading.

He declines. And in the same breath he tells them what to do instead, and it is not what most of us assume.

He does not say hold it loosely. He does not say it does not matter that much. He says be fully persuaded in your own mind, and the word behind fully persuaded means carried all the way to the brim, filled to capacity, a ship under full sail. Paul's actual instruction is to hold what you hold at maximum weight.

Which means the room he is describing is not a room of people who have softened. It is a room of people who are each carried to the brim and who differ, and who receive one another anyway, and Paul governs the receiving and leaves the question alone.

So hear this and let it settle where the suspicion has been sitting. Staying at that table is not going soft, and it never was. The written word puts the command to be fully persuaded and the command to receive one another in the same chapter, and the Holy Spirit, who authored both, did not write a contradiction into the same page.

Now the part that is worth turning over slowly, and it is the reason liberty is not a concession.

A conviction held because the people around you hold it is not a persuasion. It is a weather report. The only place a real conviction can form is a room where the other position is genuinely allowed to stand there and be held by someone you respect. Take that away and you do not get a stronger conviction. You get people agreeing, which looks identical from the outside and is a completely different substance.

The liberty you leave that person is the same liberty your own conviction is standing on. God has written it into the way He deals with people: He puts the choosing in the person and He does not force the mind, and the Holy Spirit persuades rather than compels, which is why the room He builds has room in it.

And nothing in this asks you to hold your position more lightly. I want that said flatly, because the instinct when somebody preaches liberty is to hear it as a request to move toward the middle, and that is not what Paul said and it is not what I am saying. Be carried to the brim. Be fully persuaded. And leave the key where she can reach it.

Now let me say the rest to you and not about them, because one of the two women on that step is you.

You know the person. You know the room where the two of you are in it again this week. And you have started to wonder, quietly, whether your continuing to show up is faithfulness or weakness, and you have not asked anybody because the question itself feels like an admission.

It is faithfulness, and it has been the whole time. Scripture calls it receiving one another, which is what Christ did with people who were wrong about a great many things, and the Holy Spirit does not hand a person that kind of patience as a consolation prize for having no convictions.