Fifth Sunday in October

I Samuel 28:20-25


My wife and I, driving home the other night, were talking about trick-or-treating. She was sharing her thoughts on the difference between Linus and his well-tended pumpkin patch (which I wrote about last week) and the others in the Peanuts gang who went out in costume, taking joy in the act of receiving. That, after all, is what trick-or-treating is: a celebration of receiving.


This, along with Saul's refusal of hospitality, caused me to consider how little I partake in the joy of receiving something from someone else, how little I actually allow anyone to actually give me anything. And I found myself thinking about Halloween when I was young.


I carried with me, in most of my trick-or-treating, a plastic pumpkin. It was not especially big or deep, but it held its share. And I had a goal each year: I wanted it to be so full that, when we reached my grandparents house, I'd have to dump it out in a grocery bag before continuing on to their neighborhood. It's a goal, I guess, that could seem a little greedy, but greed had nothing to do with it. I didn't want to have more than anyone else. I just wanted to have received so much that I could no longer hold it. I wanted to set out again with a bucket that, while it looked empty, was actually full to overflowing.


These days my goal on Halloween night is to give away all the candy I have in-hand. Part of this is a change in role—from child to adult. But, unfortunately, it's also an indication of a change in me. I can't remember the last time I really felt that Halloween excitement that this day or this night I would receive something from someone else. And I have lost all sense of that desire to find myself so full to overflowing that I have to empty my pail before continuing.


Somewhere I lost the joy of receiving. I lost it with those around me, and I lost it with God. At some point in the years when I took pains to decide what costume to wear and now when I rarely take the time to dress up, I became more concerned with what I could give than with allowing others, and God, to give to me. I began to focus more on the joy I felt standing at the door giving candy rather than the joy found on the porch where, for no reason other than grace, I was given something on my journey through the darkness.


Perhaps this is why I've found myself aching from emptiness now and again this year. Maybe instead of a grocery bag full of candy in the house behind me, my pail is truly empty. Yet I still keep trying to reach deeper into it and find something else to give. In so doing, I move farther and farther from joy.


Maybe it is time to knock and allow other hands to give to me.


God, help me, when I feel empty, to hold out my pail for you to fill it once again.