Forty-Eight on an Ordinary Tuesday

Kekoa was halfway through cleaning out the back of the truck when the question arrived, and it did not arrive as a crisis, which is why it has stayed.

He was forty-eight in March. Nothing happened in March. Nobody made a speech, he did not get a diagnosis, and there is no story here about a man who lost something.

He was pulling old rope and two lengths of pipe and a broken cooler out of a truck bed on a Tuesday afternoon in the sort of weather that has no opinion about anything, and the question came up out of the ground with no warning at all.

If the work went, and the standing that goes with the work, and being the one people ring, what would be left of me.

He stood there with a length of rope in his hand.

It is not that he thinks any of it is going. The work is steady. He is better at it now than he was at thirty and everybody knows it. He is on two committees he did not ask to be on. When the storm came through in February his phone did not stop for four days, and he liked that, and he is honest enough with himself to know he liked it.

That is the part that made the question stay. Not fear. Recognition. He had gone about twenty-five years without ever asking what was underneath, and the reason he had not asked is that the answer had never been needed, and a man does not go looking for a foundation while the house is standing up fine.

What got him was his own mother, four days later, on the phone about something completely else. He said, half joking, that he had been having a strange week. And she said, in the flat voice she uses when she is not going to argue with him: Kekoa. You were mine before you were any use to anybody. You were mine at four hours old and you had done nothing.

You were mine at four hours old and you had done nothing.

Kekoa sat on his own tailgate with the phone against his ear and could not say anything for a moment, and he could not have explained it to one person on either of those committees.

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

He thought: I have been building a foundation out of usefulness for twenty-five years, and there was already one under it before I could hold my own head up.

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 standing, not a phone that does not stop. 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 let me be plain about what this article will not do. It will not predict anything. Nothing here is a warning that the work is going, and nothing here uses the fear of losing your standing to make its point, because borrowing a man's fear to teach him something true is a cheap way to do an honest job. The work is fine. Stay on the committees. If you are genuinely short, 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 answer the question that came up out of the ground on that Tuesday, and I would rather the word of God answered it, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed.

The list of things that have been ruled out

Paul ends the eighth chapter of Romans with a list, and the list is the argument. He does not say trust me. He goes through the categories one at a time, and the Holy Spirit has been carrying that list to men on tailgates ever since.

For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.Romans 8:38-39

Read what he covers. Death and life, which is both states a person can be in. Things present and things to come, which is both directions time runs. Height and depth, which is every position. And then, in case anybody is still holding something back, nor anything else in all creation.

He is not being poetic. He is closing every door in the building on purpose, and the written word puts that last clause there specifically for the thing you were about to say did not get mentioned, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a closed door feel like safety rather than like an argument won.

Your standing is in all creation. Your work is in all creation. The phone that did not stop in February is in all creation. Every single item on the list you were compiling in the back of that truck is covered by the last four words of that sentence.

You are not a man in crisis for asking. You are somebody who noticed, at forty-eight, that he had built a foundation out of something and had never checked what was under it, and the written word does not scold anybody for checking. It answers, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an answer land in a body rather than only in an argument.

And here is what is already true of you this afternoon, with the truck half unloaded. You are rich in the place that holds. His word says nothing in all creation is able to separate you from the love of God, present tense, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a settled fact in a man rather than a verse he can quote.

What was underneath the twenty-five years

Think about what got you on that tailgate. It wasn't sympathy. Your mother has never once offered you sympathy.

It was: you were mine at four hours old and you had done nothing. It was a fact stated by somebody with the standing to state it, about a stretch of your life that contains no achievements whatsoever. You were starving to hear the foundation described by somebody who was there before you built anything, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as insecurity, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a man and not merely about him.

That is the honest thing under the question. It was never a fear that the work would go. It was that a man who has been useful for twenty-five years genuinely cannot tell, from the inside, whether he is loved or employed.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. You were loved before you were useful and the order has never once reversed. Jesus was declared the beloved Son at His baptism, out loud, in front of a crowd, before He had done a single work of ministry, and He was on that tailgate before your mother said a word.