All These Years I Served You

Nalani was the one who stayed, and for twenty years nobody in that family said thank you, and for nineteen and a half of them she genuinely did not mind.

She was the one who took the calls. She was the one who did the paperwork after the funeral, and the second lot of paperwork eleven months later that nobody knew about because she never mentioned it. She was the one who drove her aunt to the appointments in the town an hour away, every time, for four years, and rearranged her own work around it, and never once billed anybody for the fuel.

Her cousin Dane left when he was twenty-two and came back three times in eighteen years, and each of those three times the whole family reorganized itself around him for a fortnight.

That is not bitterness. That is a description, and everybody in the family would agree with it, and most of them would laugh about it.

The party was in June. Dane came home for good, or said he had, and there was a party, and it was a good party, and Nalani helped set it up because of course she did.

And at some point in the evening she went out to the side of the house to get more ice out of the second freezer, and she stood out there in the dark with the noise coming through the wall, and she did not go back in for about twenty minutes.

What she felt was not resentment. She has turned it over enough times since to be sure of that.

What she felt was a very simple question, arriving with the force of something that had been waiting twenty years for a gap: when is somebody going to do this for me.

And directly behind it came the shame, which is the part she still cannot say to anybody in that family, because what kind of woman stands outside her own cousin's welcome home and counts.

She went back in. She carried the ice. She was funny and she was warm and nobody noticed a thing.

What finally cracked it was her nephew, who is nine, and who found her the next morning washing up before anybody else was awake, and stood there in his pajamas and said: Aunty, why are you always the one doing it? Come and sit down. You're allowed.

You're allowed.

Nalani stood at her own sister's sink with her hands in the water and found that her face had gone, and she could not have explained it to one person under that roof.

And the sentence that arrived, standing there, had nothing to do with Dane.

She thought: I have served for twenty years, and I have just found out I have been waiting for somebody to tell me I was allowed to sit down.

Let me say the word plainly first

Before we go on I want to be plain about what wealth means on this site, because the word is slippery and I would rather be understood than admired.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a share, not what is owed. A portion is the old table word for what is set down in front of somebody because they belong at that table, and Scripture takes that ordinary word and does something startling with it: God says of certain people that He Himself is their portion. That is the only sense the word carries here, and it is not a smaller helping given to the ones who stayed and got no party.

And let me be as plain the other way. Money is not wicked, wanting to be thanked is not a sin, and twenty years of driving to appointments is not martyrdom. Nothing on this page ties what God does to what you have or to what you give, and that wire is not run here and never will be. If you are truly short, if there is a date and a figure and a knot in your stomach, that is real and it deserves a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that.

And one more thing. Whoever taught you that staying earns something, and somebody did, without ever putting it in a sentence, in a family or a church or a whole culture that simply assumed it, is not on trial here. I do not know their name and I would not use it. What I want to look at is the account, and I would rather the word of God did the looking, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed.

The brother in the yard

There is a story Jesus told that almost everybody remembers wrong. It gets called the story of the lost son, and it has two sons in it, and the one He spends the ending on is the one who never left.

The party is going. The music is audible. And the older brother will not come in, and his father comes out to him, which is the detail that decides everything, and the Holy Spirit has been carrying that detail out to people standing in yards ever since.

But he answered his father, Look, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat, that I might celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your property with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him! And he said to him, Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.Luke 15:29-31

Read what the father does not do. He does not call the young man ungrateful. He does not tell him to be happy for his brother. He does not correct the arithmetic, and Scripture lets the arithmetic stand exactly as the older brother stated it.

He says two things, and they are the two things this whole article exists to hand you, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes them off a page and into a kitchen at six in the morning. You are always with me. And everything I have is already yours.

Which means the party was never the proof. It never had been. The older brother had been standing in the middle of everything he was waiting to be given, for years, in his working clothes, believing the yard was a waiting room.

You are not a resentful woman. You are somebody who was standing inside the inheritance and did not know it, and the written word does not scold anybody for that. It comes outside and says so, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a thing you can feel rather than a thing you can only agree with.

What the twenty years were actually doing

You have everything the Father has, right now, in a kitchen, with the washing up not done. His word says all that is mine is yours, present tense, spoken to the son who was angry at the time, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a fact in a family rather than a phrase in a book.

Think about what actually broke you open. It wasn't the party. You've helped set up a dozen parties.

It was a nine year old in pajamas saying come and sit down, you're allowed. It was somebody handing you permission you had been waiting twenty years to be given by somebody with the authority to give it. You were hungry to be told you were allowed. You still are, and there is nothing self-pitying anywhere in that.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you this morning. Every appointment you drove to was seen. Every piece of paperwork nobody knew about was seen. Not one of them bought anything and not one of them was wasted, and both are true at the same time. Jesus knelt down and did the lowest job in the room for men who were arguing about rank while He did it, and He was out there beside the second freezer in the dark with you for the whole twenty minutes.