I Can Only Name What Is Missing

Caitríona found it out doing an exercise she did not want to do, in a small group she nearly did not go to, and she has not been able to put it down since.

They were asked to write two lists. What is good in your life, and what is missing. Four minutes each.

She has done that sort of thing before and has always found it slightly embarrassing and has always cooperated, and she cooperated this time.

The missing list took two minutes and had eleven items on it and every one of them had a detail attached. Not just the obvious ones. Specific things, with dates on some of them.

The good list took the full four minutes and had six items on it and she could not get any of them past two words. Health. Friends. Work, mostly. The flat. Faith, which she wrote and then looked at for a while. Her sister.

Nobody read anything out. That was not the exercise.

But Caitríona sat in a room with two pieces of paper in front of her and looked at the difference in the handwriting, because the missing list was written fast and the good list had been labored over, and she thought: I am fluent in one of these languages and I can barely order a coffee in the other.

What got her was a woman in that group afterward, in the doorway, putting on a coat, who said, apropos of nothing, in the tone of somebody who has read something recently and is still chewing on it: I read that grief is very specific and gratitude is usually generic, and that this is not a character flaw, it is just how the mind files.

That is not a character flaw. It is just how the mind files.

Caitríona stood in a hallway with two pieces of paper folded in her hand and could not say anything, and she could not have explained it to anybody in that group.

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

She thought: I have spent years believing the detailed list was the truer one, because it was the more detailed one, and I have never once questioned that.

Let me say the word properly 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 honest than impressive with a woman standing in a hallway holding two folded pages.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a good list, not what could be written down in four minutes. 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 remarkable 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 piece where that has to become something a person can actually say in detail.

And let me be plain about the eleven items before we go further. They are real. Nothing on this page says the missing list is a lie or a mood or a failure of perspective, and any article that tried would deserve to be closed. 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 much narrower. I want to look at why one list is fluent and the other is not, and I would rather the word of God did the looking, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed at it.

Where the good is

The sixteenth psalm has a second verse that people mostly read past on the way to the famous ones, and it is one line long.

I say to the LORD, You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you.Psalm 16:2

I am not going to improve on that. The Holy Spirit has been carrying it to people with two very unequal lists for three thousand years and it does not want my help.

But notice what it is doing, because it is not what it first sounds like. It sounds, on a quick reading, like a denial: I have nothing good. It is the opposite. It is a statement about where the good is, not about whether there is any.

Apart from you. That is a location. He is not saying his life is empty; he is saying that everything in it that is genuinely good is good because of a relationship to a Person, and that there is no separate category of good that exists somewhere off to one side.

Which changes what a good list is. Your six items were not thin because your life is thin. They were thin because you were trying to write them as objects, and they are not objects, they are places where a Person has been.

You are not ungrateful and you are not depressed. You are somebody whose mind files losses with dates and files goodness without any, which is what minds do, and the written word does not scold anybody for that. It relocates the good, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between agreeing with a verse and being able to write a longer second list.

And here is what is true of you today, before one item moves from one page to the other. You have a portion and it is not generic. His word says I have no good apart from you, present tense, as a location, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a settled fact in a body rather than a line nobody stops at.

Why one list was fluent

Think about what got you in that hallway. It wasn't sympathy. That woman was putting her coat on and thinking about something she had read.

It was: that is not a character flaw, it is just how the mind files. It was an ordinary sentence that took a piece of evidence you had been using against yourself for years and reclassified it in about six seconds. You were starving to have it explained rather than confessed, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as excuse-making, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a person and not merely about them.

That is the honest thing under the two pages. You have not been failing to be thankful. You have been reading the length of a list as evidence about a life, and no additional good thing arriving would change that, because you would file it in two words as well.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. The good is not thin, it is filed under a Person. Jesus asked people what they wanted with startling specificity, over and over, which is a way of teaching somebody to be detailed about the right list, and He was in that hallway while the coats were being found.