In Case Enjoying It Uses It Up

Fionnuala noticed it with a candle, which is a small enough thing that she has not told anybody, and which is why it will not leave her alone.

Somebody gave her a candle at Christmas. A good one, the kind that costs more than a candle ought to. And in September, nine months later, it was still in the cupboard in its box, and she took it out and looked at it and put it back.

Not because she is saving it for an occasion. She checked herself on that, honestly, standing there. There is no occasion coming. She put it back because using it would use it up.

And then she stood in her own hallway and thought about the year.

It has been a good year. The best in a long time. The house is quiet in the way she wanted it to be quiet. Her work settled in February and has stayed settled. There is a friendship that started in the spring that she thinks might be the real kind. She had a week in Donegal in June, alone, and it was exactly what she hoped it would be.

And she has been living the entire year the way she has been treating that candle.

She does not let herself enjoy the friendship properly, in case. She kept the week in Donegal at a slight distance while she was in it, which she is aware is a ridiculous sentence. She has caught herself, more than once, deliberately thinking about something worrying while something good was happening, and she cannot explain that to herself at all.

The last long stretch was four years and it ended in her early thirties, and she does not talk about it.

What got her was the friend from the spring, who has no idea about any of it, who said on the phone, in the middle of something else entirely: you know you're allowed to like this, don't you. It's not going to spend it.

It's not going to spend it.

Fionnuala sat on the stairs in her own hallway with the phone still in her hand and could not answer for a second, and she could not have explained it to anybody who knows her.

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

She thought: I have spent a whole good year holding it at arm's length, in case being glad about it was the thing that would end it.

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 sitting on her own stairs.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a run of luck, not a good year. 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 piece is for one particular reader, so let me say exactly who. It is for the person who has enough and is holding it at arm's length. If you are genuinely short, if the rationing is not a habit but an actual necessity this month, then nothing here is asking you to feel differently about that, and an article that did would deserve closing. Real lack is real and deserves a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that. What I want to look at is a candle in a cupboard in September, and I would rather the word of God did the looking, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed.

New every morning

Lamentations is the bleakest book in the Bible. It is a funeral for a city, and it does not tidy itself up at the end. And in the exact middle of it, a man who has lost everything writes three lines that the Holy Spirit has been carrying to careful people ever since.

The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22-23

New every morning. Not renewed when they run low. Not topped up when somebody has been careful with them. New, each morning, as a property of the supply.

That is a description of something that cannot be spent. A cake can be spent. A candle can be spent. A supply that arrives new every morning has no relationship at all to how much of yesterday's you enjoyed.

You are not a strange woman for the candle. You are somebody who came out of four years believing that good things are a finite quantity and that gladness draws them down, which is what four years like that teaches. The written word does not scold anybody for that, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between agreeing that His mercies are new and actually lighting a candle in September.

And here is what is true of you this evening, before you know one thing about next year. You have today, and the word says His mercies are new every morning, and His Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a woman on a set of stairs.

What the rationing is actually doing

Think about what got you on the phone. It wasn't the reassurance. You'd have argued with reassurance.

It was: it's not going to spend it. It was somebody naming the arithmetic you have been running silently for four years. You were starving to have that said out loud by another person, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as weakness, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a person and not merely about them.

That is the honest thing under the rationing. Holding a good year at arm's length is not modesty. It is an attempt to be uninjured when it goes, and it works, in the sense that a woman who never lit the candle will not miss it. What it costs is the year.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. Enjoying a good thing has never once shortened it. God is not running a supply that gladness depletes. Jesus made a great deal more wine than a wedding needed, at a party, for people who had already been enjoying themselves, and He was on those stairs before the phone rang.