How Long It Took Me to Answer Her

Camille was asked the question in a car, at a set of lights, by a twenty-four year old who had no idea she was doing anything.

The girl is somebody Camille mentors, informally, which is to say the girl rings her and Camille answers. They were driving back from something. The girl had been made permanent that week and was in the good kind of turmoil about it.

And she said, looking out of the window: can I ask you something a bit weird? If your job went tomorrow, what would you still have?

Camille said: sorry, what?

And the girl said it again, less confidently, and Camille said: right. Yes.

And then there was a silence, and Camille has counted it since, because the lights are eleven seconds and she remembers that they went green while she was still not saying anything.

She said something in the end. She said something about her family, and her health, and she made a joke about the mortgage, and the girl laughed and the conversation moved.

But Camille drove the rest of the way with a very particular feeling, which is the feeling of having been asked a genuine question by somebody who trusted her and having had nothing ready.

She has been doing that job for nineteen years. She is senior. People send her their difficult problems. And a twenty-four year old asked her what was underneath it and she needed eleven seconds and then produced a list.

What got her was on the Sunday. An old man in her church, who is eighty-six and does not know one thing about her career, was asked in front of everybody to say something, and he stood up slowly and said: I have one thing. I want to be where He is. That is the whole of it. Sit down, Nathaniel.

And he sat down.

I have one thing.

Camille sat in a row of chairs on a Sunday morning and had to look straight ahead for a while, and she could not have explained it to a single person she works with.

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

She thought: it took me eleven seconds and a list, and it took him four words and no thinking at all, and I want to know how a person gets there.

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 sitting in a row of chairs.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a title, not nineteen years of seniority. 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 let me say plainly what this article will not do. It will not predict anything. Nothing here is telling you the job is at risk, and nothing here uses that fear to do the work, because leaning on somebody's fear to teach them something true is a cheap way to do an honest job. The job is fine. Nineteen years of being good at something is not a spiritual problem. 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 look at the eleven seconds, and I would rather the word of God did the looking, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed.

One thing, and he does not hesitate

David writes a psalm in the middle of genuine trouble, with armies in it, and in the fourth verse he does the thing Camille could not do in a car.

One thing have I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in his temple.Psalm 27:4

One thing. Not a list. Not a priority order with a top item. One.

And notice what the one thing is. It is not a rescue, which is what a man with armies around him would be expected to name. It is not an outcome at all. It is a location, and the location is a Presence: to dwell in the house of the LORD, to gaze, to inquire. Every verb in it is about being in a room with Somebody rather than about getting something out of Him.

That is why an eighty-six year old can say it in four words with no preparation. He is not remembering an answer. He is describing where he lives.

You are not a shallow woman for the eleven seconds. You are somebody who was asked, without warning, for the one thing, and who has spent nineteen years becoming excellent at a life made entirely of many things. The written word does not scold anybody for that, and it is the Holy Spirit who turns a psalm into a place a person can actually stand.

And here is what is already true of you this morning, before you change one thing about your work. You are rich in the place that holds. His word says the one thing asked for is to dwell in His house all the days, present tense, all of them, including the working ones, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a settled fact in a body rather than an ambition in a book.

What the eleven seconds showed

Think about what got you in that row. It wasn't the old man's confidence. You have watched confident people all your life.

It was that he did not have to look for it. It was four words and a sitting down. You were starving to have one thing rather than a good list, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as inadequacy, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a person and not merely about them.

That is the honest thing under the silence. It was not that you have nothing. You have a great deal, and the list you gave that girl was true. It is that a person who has never been asked to name the one thing gradually stops having one, and the seniority does not tell you it is happening.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. The one thing has been available every single one of those nineteen years, on the working days, in the office, at the lights. Jesus told a woman who was busy and competent and doing genuinely necessary work that one thing was necessary, and He did not tell her off for the work, and He was in that car for all eleven seconds.