He Touched the Ones Nobody Touched

Her dish comes home almost full.

Every month there is a long table in a church hall, and every month she brings the same rice and beans her grandmother taught her to make, and every month she carries it back out to the car with the foil still tight over three quarters of it. Nobody said anything. Nobody would. They are good people, and they love her, and one of them prays for her by name on Tuesdays. It is just that the serving spoon in her dish stays cleaner than the serving spoon in the dish beside it, and she has counted, and she is right.

She has had the skin on her hands for four years. She has had the creams and the specialists and the paper gown and the photographs under the cold lamp. That is not the part that gets her in the car. The part that gets her in the car is the half second. The handshake at the door that turns into a wave. The hug that ends a beat early. The kind man who sets a thing down on the counter instead of putting it into her palm, and does not decide to do it, and would be horrified to know he did.

You know the half second. I am not going to pretend you do not, and I am not going to pretend it is nothing, because it is not nothing. Whatever it is on you, the scar or the tremor or the bag under your coat or the cough people time with their eyes, it has quietly rewritten how a room arranges itself around you. And here is the cruelest turn of it, the one nobody sees: you have started doing it too. You reach a little less. You sit at the end. You leave early so no one has to work out what to do with you at the door. You have become the first person to step back from yourself.

The distance that opened without anyone deciding

I want to name what has actually been laid on you, because it is two things and everyone only ever counts one.

The first is the condition. The pain, the fatigue, the appointments, the tests, the mornings that take an hour to start. That one gets acknowledged. People ask about that one.

The second one has no name, so nobody asks. It is the slow closing of the ordinary human warmth that everyone else swims in without noticing it, and it costs you more than the first one does. It is being handled instead of held. It is being a situation in the room rather than a person in the room. It is the loneliness of being loved carefully. And you cannot even be angry about it, because nobody did it on purpose, and that is exactly why it does not stop.

I keep books for a living, in a manner of speaking. My whole calling is entries and columns and what is actually true when you total it. So hear me count this honestly: you have not been imagining it. You have not been dramatic. The distance is real, and you have been reading the ledger correctly all along. The Spirit does not argue with an honest total and neither will I. What you have read wrong is one single line, Psalm 107:20, and it is the line that governs everything else.

You have read the flinch as the opinion of God.

It is not. It has never been. Look at what He actually did.

He sent his word, and healed them, and delivered them from their destructions.Psalm 107:20

He sent. That is the whole architecture of the thing in three letters. The movement is toward. Nowhere in the story of God is there a moment where heaven backs up half a step from a body that is going wrong. There is a leper in Matthew who comes to Jesus in a culture where the law itself kept him at a distance, where he was required to announce himself so people could arrange themselves away from him, where distance was not rudeness but righteousness. And the text says that Jesus put forth His hand and touched him, and said, I will, be thou clean.

Read the order. He touched him first. The touch came before the cleansing. Jesus could have healed him with a sentence from six feet away and everyone watching would have called it a miracle and gone home satisfied. He did not. He crossed the gap that everyone in that man's life had been maintaining for years, and He crossed it while the disease was still on him.

That is not a detail. That is the message with the wrapping off. God does not wait for you to become touchable. He touches you, and that is what makes you clean.

And I know the second thought, because it arrives in everyone at this exact point and it arrives quietly, dressed as humility. Yes, but that was Him, and that was then, and those were people in a book. This is my kitchen, and my Tuesday, and my hands.

Here is the answer, and it is not an argument, because you cannot be argued into being wanted. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. The character of God is not a season that passed. He is not more reserved now than He was on that road. Whatever He did on that day, He did because of who He is, and He has not changed His nature since, and He is not standing off from you now.

He is not repulsed by you. Not by the smell of the ointment, not by the swelling, not by the wheelchair, not by the part you keep covered, not by the four years of it, not by how tired you are of talking about it. Not for one half of one second. He has never once needed to arrange His face before He looked at you. That is not warmth I am adding to make you feel better; Hebrews 13:8 has Him the same yesterday, today and for ever, and the Spirit who is in your kitchen while the dish cools on the counter is the same Spirit who moved that hand toward a leper on a road.

And there is one more line in that account, and it is the one I would build a whole house on. Under the law, what was unclean transferred. If a clean man touched an unclean one, the clean man became unclean. That was the rule, and everyone in that crowd knew it, and it is why the distance existed in the first place. So when Jesus put out His hand, everyone watching braced for the transfer to run the usual direction.

It ran the other way.

Nothing passed from that man onto Jesus. Everything passed from Jesus onto that man. That is the direction the traffic moves when God touches something, and it has not reversed since. You have spent a long time assuming that what is wrong with you contaminates whatever comes near it, including hope, including prayer, including people. It does not. His wholeness is the stronger thing in the contact, and the contact is happening now. Matthew 8:3 is where that hand is written down, and His Spirit is why it reaches the foil covered dish on the back seat of your car instead of staying on the page.