My Name on the Door

Yolanda had told that story about the door so many times, and so long before it happened, that when it finally happened she felt like she was in a room with the person she used to be.

Fourteen years. Fourteen years in a building where she had started on the phones and been told, kindly, twice, by two different people, that she should think about whether this was really her path. Fourteen years of night classes and a folder of certificates and a stretch in the middle where she did two jobs and slept about five hours and did not say so.

The maintenance man put the letters on at eight on a Monday morning. She had seen the proof. She knew what her own name looked like in vinyl. And she still stopped in the corridor with her coat over her arm and looked at it, and there it was, hers, on the glass, with the title under it.

She went in. She put her bag down. She sat in the chair.

And she waited.

That is the piece nobody tells you about. She sat behind a desk she had wanted for fourteen years and waited for something to arrive, the way you wait on a lift, and after a minute she caught herself doing it and felt ridiculous and opened her laptop.

She was not sad. Sad would have been something to take home. She was hollow. There was a room in her that had been kept ready for fourteen years and the thing she had been keeping it ready for had walked in and turned out to be the wrong size.

It got her at about four, on the phone to a supplier, of all things.

Because the man on the other end said, in the middle of a sentence about delivery windows, hold on, sorry, my mother is here. And she heard him put his hand over the receiver and heard him say, in a completely different voice, hey. Sit down. I want to hear about this.

That was all. Hey. Sit down. I want to hear about this.

Yolanda put the phone down at the end of the call and sat in a good chair behind a good desk under her own name in vinyl letters and found that her eyes had gone, and she would not have been able to explain it to one single person in that building.

She drove home the long way. And the sentence that arrived, at the lights, was not about the door at all.

She thought: I got my name put on a room, and what I actually wanted was for somebody to want to hear about it.

Say the word right, before we start

I want to be plain about what this site means by wealth, because it is a slippery word and I would rather be clear than clever with a woman driving home the long way.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a title, not a number that moved. 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 plain kitchen 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 it is not a consolation helping handed out to the ones who did not get the real thing.

And I want to be just as plain the other way. Money is not wicked. Ambition is not a sin. Wanting the fourteen years to be recognized is not unspiritual, and nothing on this page ties what God does to what you have or what you give. That wire is not run here and it never will be. If you are genuinely short, if there is a date and a figure and a knot in your stomach, that is real and it deserves a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that. Nothing here is a scolding for wanting your name on the door.

What I want to do is narrower. I want to name the hollow place behind that door, and I would rather the word of God named it, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed at it.

The panting is not a failure

The sons of Korah wrote one of the most physical lines in the whole book, and they wrote it about a deer that was in trouble.

As a deer pants for flowing streams, so pants my soul for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?Psalm 42:1-2

Panting. Not longing, not reflecting, not wondering. Panting, the way a body does when it has run further than it should have and needs water now.

Look at what the psalm does not do with that. It does not apologize for it. It does not tell the writer to want less water or be more grateful for the field he is standing in. It looks at a soul out of breath and says: yes, and here is what it is out of breath for.

You are not a woman who cannot be satisfied. You are a soul panting for the living God, and the written word puts that in a song rather than in a confession. I am not putting my own idea over you. That is what Scripture says about it, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line about a deer and lands it in a corridor at eight on a Monday morning.

And notice the two words that do the work: the living God. Not a position, not a result, not a room with your name on it. Living, which is to say a Person who is present and speaking and in that car with you at the lights.

What fourteen years could not do

Think about what actually got you on that phone call. It wasn't the door. You earned the door, and nobody can take the fourteen years off you.

It was a man putting his hand over a receiver and changing his voice. It was hey, sit down, I want to hear about this. You were thirsty to be wanted to hear about, and you still are, and there is nothing childish anywhere in that.

And you have a portion already, right there in the car, before one thing about the title or the building changes. His word says the Lord is the portion of His people, present tense, not pending, not scheduled for whenever the hollow feeling passes, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a fact in a car rather than a phrase on a page.

Here is what the word has settled about you, so His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. You were never fourteen years away from being somebody worth hearing about. God has wanted to hear about it the entire time, through every night class and every one of those five hour nights and both of the conversations where somebody kindly suggested this might not be your path. Jesus stopped a whole moving crowd to hear one woman tell Him the truth about twelve hard years, and He did not hurry her, and He has been in the passenger seat since the lights.