Daily Devotions

1 Where we are

Wei Loon is fifty-one. At four on Friday he hands his laptop across the desk in an office at Changi Business Park, signs two forms, and carries a box down to the lobby. At six he is sitting in the café he has given fifty dollars a month to for four years, and the trainee wiping the next table asks how he is doing. It is the first time all day anyone has asked. He says he is fine. What he cannot say is that the fifty dollars was never only kindness. It was proof of which side of the table he was on, and he has always quietly pitied the other side.

2 What the passage is doing

Paul is writing to a church in Corinth that had sorted itself by usefulness. Some had the visible gifts, the money, the standing; others were the ones being helped, and everybody knew who was who. Into that, Paul says a body cannot work like this. The eye cannot tell the hand it has no need of it. And then he goes further: the parts that look weaker are the necessary ones, and the whole body suffers together when one part does.

3 Taking it with you

If you have spent years being the one who helps, being helped can feel like demotion — as though your worth was the giving, and now the giving has stopped. Hear it plainly: you were never the eye looking down at the hand. You were always the hand too. And Christ himself came into a body that needed things. He was fed, carried, wept over, and buried by other people's hands, and none of that made him less. He received so that you could stop pretending you never need to. Today you can let someone ask how you are, and tell them the truth.