Anyone Could Do It

The shoebox is still in the cupboard. She keeps it, the way people keep a photograph of a house they no longer live in.

When she took the books over, that shoebox was the books. Receipts, a bank slip from two years earlier, a note on the back of an envelope that said Mrs A, three tins, will pay Friday, dated nobody knew when. There was eleven hundred dollars unaccounted for and nobody had done anything wrong; it had simply gone into a shoebox and stopped being money.

Nine years later there is a system. Three columns, a running balance, a page at the back for the things people bring in that were not asked for. She can tell you what the pantry spent on rice in any month since she started. When the grant people came last spring with a form that terrifies most small charities, she filled it in over one afternoon and they funded it.

A new volunteer asked her last week how she learned to do it, and out it came, quick and light, the way you read out a phone number.

Oh, anyone could do it.

Nobody in that building can do it. They have tried twice, kindly, to give her a break, and both times the shoebox began to reassemble itself within a month.

And walking home there was the small drop, the one she has stopped naming, because naming it would sound like she was after something.

If you have your own version of that sentence, the one that leaves your mouth before you have decided anything, you know the drop. And it is quite likely nobody has ever told you the sentence is not humility.

Somebody handed you the wrong definition and you kept it honestly

Let me say the plain thing first, because you may have been waiting years to hear anybody say it out loud.

Humility is not thinking less of yourself. It never was. Whoever handed you that meant well by it, and it was wrong.

And it was not foolish of you to take it. I want to be exact about that, because nothing else lands until it is said. You took an instruction from people you trusted, you kept it faithfully at real cost, and keeping a badly worded instruction is loyalty aimed at the wrong number. There is no shame in the aiming.

Now read the instruction that actually governs a woman with a ledger, and notice that it starts with a fact about you rather than a duty.

As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.1 Peter 4:10

As every one has received. Before there is any ministering, there is a receiving, and the receiving happened whether or not you have ever agreed to it out loud. You have received a gift, and it was given rather than earned, and that is the ground under every column you have ever ruled. That is not my compliment about your books. It is written in 1 Peter 4:10, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a woman's ears into the place where she actually lives.

Then comes the word steward, which is the most practical word in the verse. A steward does not own the thing. A steward also does not get to pretend the thing is not there. A steward keeps an accurate inventory of what has been handed over, because that is the entire job.

So the sentence anyone could do it has been, of all things, bad bookkeeping. You have an accurate ledger for every dollar in that building and an inaccurate one for yourself, and correcting it is stewardship rather than self promotion. The word settled that long before your first month, and the same Spirit who inspired it is walking home with you while you read this.

An inventory is not a boast

Here is where a careful person gets tangled, and it is worth untying slowly, because the tangle is what keeps you saying it.

You think that naming the gift accurately is the same as claiming credit for it. It is not, and the verse takes that possibility off the table in its first four words. As every one has received. If it was received, naming it is a description of what God did and not a report on what you managed. The gratitude and the accuracy are on the same side.

Anybody who has ever kept books knows the rest of it, and you know it better than most. A figure written up beyond its worth is a false entry. A figure written down below its worth is exactly the same false entry facing the other way. Both are wrong. Both would fail an audit. Only one of them ever gets called modest.

You were never asked for a small account of yourself, and you were never asked for an inaccurate one. The written word calls you a steward of the manifold grace of God, and His Spirit is the one who makes a person able to look straight at nine years without flinching in either direction.

And nothing here is handing you self-promotion instead. I am careful about that, because a woman who has spent nine years going down is not helped by being told to start going up. That is the same false entry the other way round and it is just as tiring. Humility is not a size at all. It is a posture: a person standing at their true measure in front of a God who is immeasurably larger, and knowing exactly which of the two of them is which.

One plain word before we go on, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If part of the reason you keep yourself small is that somebody near you makes you pay for taking up space, nothing here is telling you to absorb that. Reaching for help is not a failure of humility, and in the United States 988 answers by call or text at any hour.