It starts the way Sabbath always starts … quietly.

A room full of people who’ve learned how to shoulder another week. A hum of prayers like a shawl thrown over tired shoulders. No spotlight. No fog machine. Just a woman that most people stopped really seeing a long time ago.

She slips in the way she always slips in, curved like a question mark the room forgot to answer. Eighteen years. But you can get used to almost anything if it hangs around long enough.

But Jesus sees what the room stopped seeing. He calls her over.

Hands, words, breath. And then the line she could never forget once she heard it: “Woman, you are set free.”

She straightens. Now, she can see faces where she was used to seeing only feet.

Meanwhile, the head guy clears his throat and reminds everyone, very reasonably, that there are six other days for work, and Jesus should do his healing then, because that’s what leaders do when grace shows up and starts moving the furniture around.

Because in every room, what we protect matters.

Let’s come back to our story in a minute.

I served a church years ago, and they’d written into their founding DNA a remarkable promise: every year, twenty percent of the budget went to outreach. Rain or shine, twenty percent, straight out the door. I was impressed when the search committee told me about it, pride shining in their eyes.

Then the economy hiccuped. Giving slid the way giving slides when people get nervous. We gathered around the long table with coffee that tasted like it was brewed during the Reagan administration and the spreadsheets everyone pretended to read. Where do you look for cuts so you can keep everything else afloat?

And the word came back: Personnel.

They decided we could make up the shortfall in giving without having to cut much of anything. All we had to do was keep personnel costs the same for a couple of years, and we might eventually dig out of the hole we were in. We could keep pace with maintenance, repairs, and outreach if we kept personnel costs static.

Now, as the person responsible for advocating for the staff, I pointed out that in a difficult economy and with the rise in the cost of living, to keep personnel costs the same for the foreseeable future wasn’t just failing to give people a raise; it was asking people to accept pay cuts indefinitely.

Silence. Not angry silence. Just that stillness that falls when a room realizes the math problem isn’t on the paper; it’s in the mirror. I assumed everyone was trying to be faithful. But love, it turns out, can get tangled.

I didn’t have a grand solution. I just had a question that wouldn’t go away: are we untying oxen while leaving neighbors bound?

There’s a street I think about in another part of the world. A median has been turned into a parking lot for trucks—rows and rows of them under sun‑bleached tarps. If you squint, you can read the labels: rice, flour, cooking oil, antibiotics.

Drivers play cards in the shade. Everyone is waiting on a signature. Children learn how to wait by watching their mothers. The writing on the tarps fades while the little ones learn new words for “not today.”

Lately, the world’s famine monitors have said out loud what hungry people have known for months: parts of Gaza have crossed the line into famine. People are starving. Babies are dying.

You can argue about politics, but you can’t argue with empty bellies. And still, thousands of trucks sit loaded just beyond the border. UN workers say they have warehouses full in Egypt and Jordan, enough to load thousands of trucks with food and medicine ready to roll as soon as the light turns green. Mercy made into math problems.