In the Land of the Living

Lourdes worked out what was happening to her at a wake, which is a strange place to work anything out, and she has not been able to unnotice it since.

Her uncle had died and it was not a tragedy, he was ninety-one and it was a good funeral, and afterward in the hall people said the things people say.

She counted seven, in about an hour, without meaning to count anything.

He is in a better place. He is at peace now. It is only for a while. We will see him again. He has his reward. Heaven is real. God has him.

Every one of them is true. She wants that on the record because she is not writing a piece against any of those sentences and neither is this article. She believes all seven and she said two of them herself that afternoon and meant them.

What she noticed, standing by a table with a paper plate, is that she has been comforted like this her entire life about everything, not only about death. About her mother's arthritis. About the years with her husband that were hard. About the flat. About the thing that happened at work in 2019 that she has never fully talked about.

Later. Later. Later. Not once in fifty-three years has anybody asked her, or has she asked God, what is hers now.

And she has stopped being able to form the question, because every time she gets close to it a voice in her that sounds exactly like the hall says: careful, that is worldly.

What got her was her granddaughter, seventeen, who is at the age of asking things wrong on purpose, and who said in the car going home: Abuela, what did he actually enjoy? Everybody said where he is now. Nobody said what he liked.

Nobody said what he liked.

Lourdes sat in the passenger seat and could not answer for a moment, and she could not have explained it to a single person from that hall.

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

She thought: I have been given later for fifty-three years, and a seventeen year old just asked the other question in a car, and I did not know it was allowed.

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 in a passenger seat.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a reward, not what is waiting. 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 category where that has to be answerable on a Tuesday.

And let me be plain about the seven sentences before we go one line further. They are true. Every one. This article does not take a single thing away from any of them and I would not want to be the man who tried. What is coming is real and it is better and it is not being argued with here.

What I want to do is much narrower. I want to make the other question askable, and I would rather the word of God made it askable, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed at whether you are allowed.

A man in a cave asks about now

The hundred and forty-second psalm is written by somebody hiding in a cave, in real danger, with nothing, and the Holy Spirit has kept the line in the middle of it for this exact question.

I cry to you, O LORD; I say, You are my refuge, my portion in the land of the living.Psalm 142:5

Read the last five words and notice where they put the portion.

In the land of the living. Not afterward. Not in the place he was very likely about to go, given the circumstances he was writing in. He is in a cave, and he names God as his portion here, in this life, in the country where people are still walking around and eating and having Tuesdays.

The Holy Spirit has kept that phrase for people exactly like you: people who have been given the next world so faithfully and for so long that they have quietly concluded that this one is not a proper subject for prayer.

You are not worldly. You are somebody who has been handed later, correctly and kindly, seven times an hour for fifty-three years, and who has never once been handed the other half, and the written word does not scold anybody for that. It puts a man in a cave asking about now, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between reading that and being able to ask.

And here is what is true of you today, before anything about the flat or 2019 changes. You have a portion in the land of the living. His word says it in exactly those words, present tense, from a cave, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a settled fact in a body rather than a phrase you have never noticed.

What nobody asked

Think about what got you in that car. It wasn't the sharpness. Seventeen year olds are sharp constantly and it slides off.

It was: nobody said what he liked. It was a girl asking the plainest possible question about a man's actual life, in a week where everybody had been talking beautifully about where he is now, and she did not know she was doing anything. You were starving to hear that question asked out loud, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as worldly, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a person and not merely about them.

That is the honest thing under the fifty-three years. It is not that anybody lied to you. It is that a whole half of the answer was never offered, and a person who is only ever given the second half eventually stops believing the first half exists, and no amount of true comfort about later can undo that.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. There is a portion in the land of the living and it is not a lesser subject. Jesus spent a great deal of His time on bread and fish and wine and feet and somebody's fever and somebody else's daughter, in this world, on ordinary days, and He was in that car before your granddaughter spoke.