The Key The Pastor Handed Me

The story he told the room

He set the cedar box on the table in front of him and he put both his old hands flat on top of it.

“In October of 1986,” he said, “we were in the worst farm year most of you can remember. Half this church was behind on everything, the fellowship hall we are sitting in tonight included. I was a younger man and I was worried sick we would lose it before we finished it.”

“One Tuesday night that October I came back here late for my sermon notes, which I had left on the piano. I did not turn on the lights because I was only going to be a minute.”

“And I found one of our members on her knees in the dark, waxing the floor of this sanctuary with a rag and a bucket, at midnight, alone, by the light of a flashlight she had set up on the windowsill.”

I felt the whole room start to turn, slow, like a field of sunflowers, and I understood all at once who the story was about, and I could not breathe.

“I stood at the back where she could not see me,” he said, “and I watched her work. And I want to tell you, I have had a lot of holy moments in forty-five years of ministry. I have stood at a hundred deathbeds and a thousand altars. I never had a holier one than standing in the dark watching a woman pay a debt nobody was asking her to pay, who thought not one living soul could see her.”

“I knew who she was. I knew her family was behind on their pledge, and why. And I understood, standing there, that she had figured out she could not give the money, so she was giving the only thing she had, which was her own labor and her own sleep, so that her word would not sit empty in that box by the door.”

“And I made a decision in that dark that I have kept for forty years. I decided I would never let her know I had seen. Because some gifts a person needs to give in secret, and it is not a pastor’s place to take that away from them by saying thank you.”

He looked down the table at me then, and every face in that room came with his.

“But I am an old man now,” he said, “and I am done here after tonight, and I have decided there is one thing worse than embarrassing Edith Mowrer this evening, and that is going to my grave letting her believe she did that alone.”