It Adds No Sorrow

Her mother had a saying and it was not a joke, though it was always said with a small laugh.

Nothing comes free.

She said it over Christmas presents and over a lift into town and over a neighbor bringing round a pie, and she was not a bitter woman, she was a woman who had been caught out young and had built her whole way of living on the back of it. And her daughter grew up in that house and absorbed it the way children absorb everything, which is completely and without ever being told.

So now the daughter is sixty-two and she has a particular habit that nobody has ever remarked on, because it does not look like anything from the outside. When something good happens, she waits.

Somebody pays her a compliment and she waits about four seconds for the thing that comes after the comma. Somebody offers her something and she is already working out the shape of the obligation. Her son turns up unannounced with a bag of shopping and she is glad, she is genuinely glad, and underneath the gladness there is a small clear part of her mind that says: right, what is this about.

And on Sunday morning the minister lifts his hands and says the LORD bless you and keep you, and she does not doubt it for a second.

She just waits for the second half of the sentence. The bit about what it will cost. And when it does not come, she does not relax. She assumes the invoice is in the post.

There is a verse for exactly this, and it is not a general verse

I have carried this one around for years and I have handed it to a lot of people, and I have never once handed it to somebody who was not already flinching.

The blessing of the LORD, it maketh rich, and he addeth no sorrow with it (Proverbs 10:22).

Now, that verse is often read as being about money, and it is not really. Rich there is a wide word. But the half of it I want you to look at is the second half, because it is one of the very few places in Scripture where God goes out of His way to tell you what a blessing does not come with.

He addeth no sorrow with it.

That is God anticipating the flinch. That is Him saying, before you have said anything, I know what you are waiting for and it is not coming.

You have been handed something with no invoice attached, and there is no small print anywhere on it. The word says it plainly and it says it in the same breath as the blessing itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a written line like that go past a person's guard and into the part of them that has been braced since childhood.

The flinch is not ingratitude. It is a scar.

I want to be careful here, because a woman like you has been misunderstood before, and usually by somebody cheerful.

You are not ungrateful. You have never once been ungrateful. You are one of the most thankful people anyone who knows you could name, and you write notes, and you remember, and you pay everything back with interest and usually early.

That is exactly the problem, and it is not a sin, it is a scar. Somebody taught you young that a good thing is the front half of a transaction, and you have been meeting the back half of transactions that were never issued for about fifty years, and it has made you tired in a way that has no name.

You are not in debt, and you have never once been in debt to Him for what He gives. Scripture says the gift of God is eternal life, and calls it a gift precisely to rule out the idea of wages (Romans 6:23), and it is the Spirit of God, not a strong resolve on your part, who quietly retrains a person who has been braced since she was six.

What God actually gets out of blessing you

Here is the thing your mother's saying never had room for, and it is the piece that dismantles the whole system.

Nothing comes free is true about people, sometimes, and it is entirely false about God, because God is not short of anything. A transaction exists to move something from someone who has it to someone who needs it, and both parties end up different. God does not end up different. He does not need what you would pay Him back with and He has never once been enriched by it.

So when He blesses you, there is no exchange happening. There is only a giving. That is what the word grace has always meant and it is why it needed its own word.

You have been given to by Someone who is not building a case and not keeping an account. The word says every good gift and every perfect gift comes down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness (James 1:17), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that unchangingness feel like safety rather than doctrine.

And I will not oversell it, because you would smell that a mile off. Receiving this today does not mean nobody will ever put a price on a kindness again. People will. Some of them will be family. What is settled is that God is not one of them, and a woman who knows that can take a good thing with both hands instead of one.