We often evaluate our involvement in evangelism and ministries of mercy according to the same scale as Mr. So-and-So. We ask, “What is in it for me? Will it fulfill me? Will I enjoy it? What will it cost me?” In doing the arithmetic, we get the answers as completely wrong as he did, because we have left God entirely out of the equation. We calculate and protect ourselves and insist that two and two can only ever equal four . . . and we may never know the blessing that we have lost. Indeed, part of the message of the Book of Ruth is that God’s kingdom operates on a different kind of calculus, a “new math” in which the way to fullness runs through emptiness. Mr. So-and-So didn’t do that kind of math, so the numbers didn’t add up for him. He clung to what he had and in consequence lost something far greater, something he never even dreamed of.-Ian Duguid