Paper Route Psychiatry

Hold unfailing your love for one another, since love covers a multitude of sins. - 1 Pe. 4:8

A young boy was once offered a paper route. It didn’t pay much money, but he knew having a job would build good character, so he took it, good character being important to fourth graders.
He began lingering on the front porch of one of his customers who was an elderly widow. She’d watch for him to come down her street, and by the time he’d pedaled up to her house, there’d be a slushy bottle of Coke waiting for him. He’d sit and drink while she talked. That was the understanding – he drank, she talked.

At first, she talked mostly about her dead husband, Roger. “Roger and I went grocery shopping this morning over to the market,” she’d say. The first time she said that, Coke went up the boy’s nose. That was back in the days when Coke going up your nose wasn’t a crime, just uncomfortable.

He went home and told his father about how she talked as if her husband were still alive. His dad said she was probably lonely, and that maybe the boy ought to just sit, listen, nod his head and smile, and maybe she’d work it out of her system. So that’s what the boy did and turned out Dad was right. After a few summers, she seemed content to leave her husband over at the cemetery.

Nowadays, we’d send her to a psychiatrist. But all she had back then was a front porch rocker and her paperboy’s ear, which turned out to be enough.

He quit his paper route after her healing and moved on to the lucrative business of lawn mowing. He didn’t see the widow for several years until he crossed her path up at the church’s annual fund-raiser dinner. She was standing behind the steam table spooning out mashed potatoes and looking radiant. Four years before, she’d had to bribe her paperboy with a Coke to have someone to talk with; now she had friends brimming over. Her husband was gone, but life went on. She had her community and was luminous with love.

Community is a beautiful thing; sometimes it even brings healing. But community isn’t so much a locale as a state of mind that is found whenever folks ask how you’re doing due to love rather than pay.

Two thousand years ago, a church elder named Peter wrote the recipe for community. “Above all else,” he wrote, “hold unfailing your love for one another, since love covers a multitude of sins.” (1 Pe. 4:8). This means that when you love a person, you occasionally have to turn a blind eye toward their shortcomings. Sometimes it’s better to nod your head and smile. Psychiatrists call that “enabling denial,” but the rest of us common folk call it “compassion.”