Two Dollars of Anything You Want

The register is the old kind, the sort that has to be hit rather than pressed, and nineteen years of hitting it has worn the paint off the four and the seven.

He can tell you what anybody buys. The woman who comes at ten past seven takes the small carton and never the large. The man with the work boots buys the same sandwich four days a week and something different on Friday. There is a family who come Sunday evenings for the flour and the oil and always argue about the olives at the door. He could stock this store from memory if the trucks stopped coming, and he could tell you the shape of two hundred lives from the shape of two hundred baskets.

What he cannot do, and has not noticed he cannot do, is put a name to almost any of them.

It is not that he is unkind. He says good evening. He asks after knees and grandchildren and the weather, and he means it, in the way you mean a thing that costs nothing. But somewhere in the nineteen years the faces stopped arriving as faces. They arrive now the way pictures arrive: quick, sorted, filed, gone.

Then a boy comes in with two dollars.

He is maybe nine. He puts the two bills on the counter and flattens them with the side of his hand, the way people do who have counted the money more than once, and he says: my mom said I can get two dollars of anything I want, but I don't know what I want.

And he stands there. He does not go and look at the shelf. He waits, because he has asked a question of a person, and he intends to be answered by that person, and there is no way to answer a boy about two dollars without looking at him.

So the man looks. The whole face. The gap in the teeth, the sunburn across the nose, the eyebrows going up in hope. It costs him something. He does not know why it costs him something. He hears himself say: what do you like, and the boy says peaches, and they go out to the crate on the sidewalk together and pick three, and the man puts a fourth in the bag and says nothing about it, and the boy says thank you, Mister, and gives him a name that is not his, some name he has been called wrong for years, and leaves.

And the man stands behind his worn-out register having looked at one whole human being for the first time in longer than he can measure, and having found it hard.

And you know that counter. Somewhere along the way you stopped seeing people and started seeing images of them, and nobody handed you a form to sign the day it happened. Faces began arriving sorted. And this week somebody stood still in front of you and waited to be looked at, and it cost you, and you did not expect it to.

Hear this before we go one step further, because I suspect you have braced for the opposite. You are not a man with broken eyes and you are not a woman who has ruined her own sight. Genesis 1:31 says God looked at everything He had made and called it very good, and your eyes were in that verdict; what has happened since is a wound to a gift and not a judgment on the one carrying it, and the Holy Spirit is in this room with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

The man who climbed a tree to watch a crowd

Come to Jericho, on a road so packed that a short man cannot see over anybody, and watch what a person does when he wants to look without being looked at.

He runs ahead. He climbs a sycamore. It is not dignified and he does not care, because up there he gets the thing he wants, which is to see the whole procession and be nothing but a pair of eyes in the leaves. Nobody looks up at a tree. He has arranged his whole position around one idea: I will do the watching, and no watching will be done of me.

And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up, and saw him, and said unto him, Zacchaeus, make haste, and come down; for to day I must abide at thy house.Luke 19:5

He looked up. Sit in those two words a while, because they are the hinge of the whole street. Everybody else in Jericho that day was looking at Jesus. Jesus was the one doing the seeing. And out of a crowd that had already sorted the man in the tree into a category and filed him under a word they used about him, Jesus lifted His eyes to a place nobody looks and found a whole person there and used his name.

You have that same attention on you right now, and it is not attention that sorts. The written word does not say Jesus identified him or recognized him; it says He saw him and called him by name, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that same look into a corner store nineteen years deep in filed faces.

And notice what Jesus did not do. He did not say: you have been up there a long time. He did not say: your eyes are the problem. He said come down, because I am coming to your house tonight, and the tree emptied out fast.

What a name costs

I want to be honest about why it was hard with the boy, because if I pretend it should have been easy you will read your own difficulty as failure, and it is not.

Looking at a whole person costs something because a whole person makes a claim on you. A picture makes none. A picture asks nothing, needs nothing, waits for nothing and can be closed. The boy asked to be helped choose, and to be answered, and to be looked at while he was answered, and that is a small weight and it is a real one. Your eyes have been trained for years to put weights down before they land. So of course it cost. That is not the wound. That is the sight coming back, and coming back always costs at the door.

You were given eyes that hold a person, and you were given them before anything happened to them. Psalm 94:9 asks whether the One who formed the eye cannot see, and the answer under the question is that He formed it on purpose and for this; His Spirit is the one doing the reopening, at His own pace, and He is neither hurrying you nor keeping score.

There is a second thing under the cost, and it is worth naming plainly. To look at a person is to be available to be looked at. The man in the tree understood that, which is exactly why he climbed it. A picture cannot look back, and there are seasons when that is precisely the appeal. So when your eyes go quiet at a counter, it is not always coldness. Sometimes it is a door being held shut from the inside by somebody tired.

You are not required to force that door, and you are not being asked to. Ezekiel 36:26 promised a heart of flesh in the place of a heart of stone, and it was promised as something done to a person and not something wrung out of them; the same Spirit who does that work is the one who put a boy with two dollars in front of a man who had stopped looking.

And if the room you are in tonight is heavier than a page can carry, do not sit alone with it. Find a real person this week, one who will sit with you without needing to fix anything, and let them be one face you can look at.

The street he had been living on

Here is the part of the Jericho story people hurry past. Jesus went home with him. He did not conduct the man's business in the street. He sat down in his house and ate, and it was in the house, not under the tree, that the man stood up and started giving things back.

Change comes to people who are sat with. It very rarely comes to people who are addressed from a distance. You have been sat with, and that is the whole reason any of this is moving. Scripture says the Son of man came to seek and to save that which was lost, and seeking is a verb with eyes in it; the Holy Spirit is doing the seeking in you right now, and He came in through the door, not through the window.

So the counter is not a row. It never was. It is the woman at ten past seven who takes the small carton because there is only her at home now, and the man with the work boots who changes his sandwich on Friday because Friday is different in his house, and the family who argue about olives because they love each other loudly. Names, all of them, under the shapes. And your eyes are His, and He is handing them back one face at a time.