She Does Not Know Who Takes Them
The word for Wednesday, August 5, 2026 is She Does Not Know Who Takes Them.
The anchor verses are Ecclesiastes 4:10 and Deuteronomy 24:19.
There is a catalpa tree on West Churchill Street in Chicago, about halfway down the block between Hoyne and Damen. A small wooden box is fixed to it.
Liz Tierney and her partner put it up in early July. She is forty three. The box looks exactly like one of those little free libraries people mount in their front yards, and within hours of it going up, somebody walked past and put a few used paperbacks inside.
Of course they did. It is a box on a tree.
It is not for books.
Every Thursday, Tierney tapes a handwritten menu to the front of it. At eleven o'clock on Saturday morning she fills it with cookies she baked that same morning. At eleven o'clock on Sunday she does it again. Somewhere between forty and sixty each time. Sprinkle cookies. Chocolate chip. One with pecan and toffee and oat.
She has exactly one guideline for the people who stop, and it concerns how many you take.
Her grandmother baked professionally. Tierney was making cakes at ten years old. Everyone told her she should do it for a living, and it never seemed like a real option, so she went into advertising instead and kept baking anyway. She has lived on that block since 2012, and for years she has brought cookies to neighbors going through hard stretches.
When somebody asked her why she built the box, she said she wanted people to experience joy.
Here is the part I keep coming back to.
She does not know who takes them.
She fills the box at eleven and walks back inside. Somebody comes down Churchill Street an hour later. She never learns their name. She never finds out which one of them was having the week that made the cookie matter.
And that is the whole design.
Because on any given Saturday morning, somebody on that block is having the worst seven days of their life, and there is no way for Liz Tierney to know which door it is behind. People are very good at looking fine. The man walking his dog looks the same on the morning after his marriage ends as he did the week before. So does the woman who got a call from her doctor on Thursday and has told nobody yet. Grief keeps regular hours. It gets dressed and goes outside and says good morning to the neighbors.
So she does not try to figure out who needs it. She puts it where anyone can reach.
The Preacher in Ecclesiastes says two are better than one. Then he says why. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.
Read who that verse is worried about. Not the person who fell. The person who fell with nobody near enough to reach down.
GOD gave Israel a law about this, and it is one of the strangest and best laws in the whole book. When you go out and harvest your field, and you leave a sheaf behind by accident, you are not allowed to go back for it. It stays where it fell. It belongs to the stranger, to the child with no father, to the widow.
Look at what the law does not ask for.
It does not ask the landowner to find out who came. There is no form. There is no proving you deserve it. Nobody has to explain their situation to anybody. The grain sits in the field and whoever is hungry enough to come out and take it, takes it, and the man who left it there goes home and never learns a single name.
The giving happens before the receiver has a name.
That is how GOD gives, and Jesus said it plainly. The Father sends rain on people who never once thanked HIM for it. The sun comes up over houses where nobody prayed that morning and over houses where somebody prayed all night, and it is the same sun, and it arrives at the same hour.
And when HE gave the thing that cost HIM everything, HE did not wait for a list of confirmed names. The offer went out first. It went out to people who would refuse it, and to people who had not been born yet, and to you on the day you were not thinking about HIM at all.
Nobody had to qualify.
You may put something out today that you never see land. A message you send. A meal you drop off. Work you do carefully that gets no reply. You will probably not find out who needed it or whether it arrived at the right hour.
The box does not need to know.
It only needs to be full, and open, and where somebody can reach it.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
- 🙏 To the one who has been giving for years and has never once been told it landed.
- 🙏 To the one on a street where everybody looks fine, including you.
- 🙏 To the one who believes you have to qualify before GOD will hand you anything.
- 🙏 To the one who took something today and had nobody to thank for it.
Grace and Peace.