Everything I Got Came Second

Marva worked it out at a table with a plate of food in front of her, and once she had seen it she could not stop seeing it.

They were doing the thing families do where somebody says something and everybody remembers it differently, and her cousin said, laughing, about the bedroom: you never minded the small one.

And Marva said no, and laughed too, and it is true that she never minded.

And then she sat there while the conversation went somewhere else and she started counting, and she could not stop counting for about four days.

The small bedroom. The second uniform. The course she did rather than the course she said she wanted, because the money went one way that year, and nobody was cruel about it and everybody explained it and the explanation was fair. The department she went into, because the other job went to somebody who had been there four months longer.

Her name, which was her aunt's name, chosen after her aunt had died, which is a lovely thing and which she has always been glad of and which she did not choose.

She is fifty-four and she can produce, without preparation, a list of about fifteen things in her life that arrived after somebody else had already made a choice.

She is not angry. She wants that established because it is genuinely true. Everybody involved was doing their best and some of them had nothing. It is not a grievance and there is nobody to send it to.

It is that she has never once, in fifty-four years, been in a room where something came to her first.

What got her was on the fifth day. Her goddaughter, who is nine, was choosing something at a table with three other children and picked hers and then held it out and said: I picked this one for you. I did it first, before mine. That is what I wanted to do.

I did it first, before mine.

Marva sat at a table with a plastic something in her hand and had to make a joke, and she could not have explained it to a single adult in that room.

And the sentence that arrived, sitting there, had nothing to do with the bedroom.

She thought: I have been handed second for fifty-four years and I did not know it had a shape until a nine year old handed me something first.

Let me say the word properly

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 clear than clever with a woman who has been counting for four days.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a share, not what was left after somebody chose. 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 outrageous with it: God says of certain people that He Himself is their portion. That is the only sense the word carries here, and this is the article where that has to answer a woman who has always come second.

And let me be plain about the fifteen things before we go further. Nobody in your family is on trial here. You have said yourself that everybody was doing their best and some of them had nothing, and that is very likely exactly true, and this article is not going to hand you a grievance you did not ask for. If you are genuinely short as well, that is real and deserves a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that.

What I want to do is narrower. I want to show you one place where you came first, and I would rather the word of God showed it, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I dressed something up for you.

What He calls His own people

Peter writes one sentence describing what a people are, and every phrase in it is about being selected rather than assigned.

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.1 Peter 2:9

I am not going to improve on that, and the Holy Spirit has been carrying it to people who were always handed what was left for two thousand years.

But look at the verbs and the adjectives, because that is what a woman counting to fifteen needs.

Chosen. Not allocated. Not what remained after the good ones had gone. Chosen is an active word about somebody deciding in favor of a thing while other things were available.

For his own possession. That phrase in that letter means a treasured property, the thing an owner keeps for himself rather than the thing he is willing to trade, and it is deliberately not the word for a spare.

And called you out of darkness, which is a word about somebody going first. He did not wait to see whether you would come. The calling preceded the coming, which means that in the one transaction that decides everything about you, you were not second.

You are not resentful. You are somebody who has an accurate list of fifteen things and no experience whatsoever of being first, and the written word does not scold anybody for that. It supplies the one instance, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between reading a famous verse and knowing where you stood in it.

And here is what is true of you tonight, before one thing about that family changes. You have a portion and it was chosen for you first. His word says a people for his own possession, present tense, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a settled fact in a body rather than a verse on a wall.

What being handed first feels like

Think about what got you at that table. It wasn't the object. It was a plastic something and you cannot remember what it was.

It was: I did it first, before mine. It was a nine year old narrating her own sequence out loud, without knowing that she was describing the one thing a woman of fifty-four has never had. You were starving to be chosen first, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as childish, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a person and not merely about them.

That is the honest thing under the four days of counting. It is not that anybody wronged you. It is that fifteen reasonable, explicable, blameless second-choices add up to an expectation, and the expectation has been running quietly for fifty-four years, and no sixteenth good thing arriving would change it, because it would arrive the same way.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. There is one place where you came first and it is the deciding one. Jesus told His friends plainly that they had not chosen Him but that He had chosen them, which is Him going out of His way to correct the order, and He was at that table before the plastic something changed hands.