Nothing Here Is In My Name

Bashir worked it out properly one evening with a pen, because his son had asked him something about wills and he had not been able to answer it, and the exercise took about four minutes and then he sat there.

The business is his brother's. It has been his brother's since 1998 and there were reasons at the time that were good reasons and are still good reasons, and Bashir has run it for nineteen of the twenty-seven years.

The flat is his wife's, because of how it was bought and who was working when. The car is the business's. His name is on a phone contract and on a library card.

He is not being wronged. He wants that said first and clearly, because the moment a man says this out loud somebody assumes a grievance, and there is not one. His brother would sign anything at all if Bashir asked him tomorrow, and Bashir will not ask, and could not tell you exactly why.

It is that his son said, casually: so what do you actually own, Baba?

And Bashir made a joke and then went home and got a pen.

Four minutes. Nothing. A man of fifty-eight who has worked every day since he was seventeen, and a page with nothing on it.

He did not feel robbed. He felt something much stranger, which is that a whole way of counting had suddenly been applied to him and he did not know whether he was allowed to reject it.

What got him was his mother, who is eighty-four and lives with them. She came in for something and saw the page and said, without asking a single question about it: your father had his name on everything, and he died in a room he did not like, in a house full of people who were waiting. You are in this house and nobody in it is waiting.

Nobody in it is waiting.

Bashir sat at his own table and had to put the pen down, and he could not have explained it to a single person in that family.

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

He thought: I have been handed one way of counting by a question my own son asked in three seconds, and my mother has just handed me a different one, and they cannot both be the list.

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 clear than clever with a man sitting in front of a blank page with a pen.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a deed, not a name on a document. 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 astonishing 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 article where that stops being a definition and becomes an answer.

And let me be plain about the practical side, because I am not going to be airy about it. If there is something that genuinely ought to be in your name for the sake of your wife and your children, then go and see somebody and get it done, and that is wisdom and not greed, and nothing on this page argues against it. 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 way of counting, and I would rather the word of God did the looking, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed at it.

The tribe that was left off the map on purpose

When the land was divided, one tribe out of the twelve was deliberately given none of it, and the reason God gives is one sentence long, and the Holy Spirit has been carrying that sentence to men with nothing in their name ever since.

And the LORD said to Aaron, You shall have no inheritance in their land, neither shall you have any portion among them. I am your portion and your inheritance among the people of Israel.Numbers 18:20

Read what is actually happening there, because it is not a consolation and it is not a spiritual runner-up prize.

Every other tribe got a region with borders. Levi got a sentence. And the sentence is not you will have to make do, or your treasure is in heaven so never mind about the ground. It is a direct exchange, stated by God about Himself, in the first person: I am your portion.

That is an arrangement. It is on the record. It was written down in the same document that gave everybody else their acres, in the same legal register, and nobody in that nation was confused about whether Levi had been provided for.

You are not a man with nothing. You are somebody who has just had one way of counting applied to him by an innocent question, and who has never been shown the other one, and the written word does not scold anybody for that. It puts a tribe on the page with no land and a portion anyway, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between reading that and being able to answer your son.

And here is what is true of you tonight, before one document changes hands. You have a portion and it is not on any deed. His word says I am your portion, in the first person, present tense, spoken by God about Himself, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a settled fact in a man rather than an interesting arrangement in an old book.

What the page could not hold

Think about what got you at that table. It wasn't comfort. Your mother has never comforted anybody in her life.

It was: you are in this house and nobody in it is waiting. It was a woman of eighty-four handing you a completely different inventory, in one sentence, and including in it something that no page with a pen could ever have held. You were starving to see the other list, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as an excuse, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a man and not merely about him.

That is the honest thing under the four minutes. It is not that you have been careless with your family. It is that a way of counting arrived without warning, one that has exactly one column in it, and a man of fifty-eight had never been given permission to say that the column is not the whole page.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. There is a portion that predates any deed and is not held by any registry. Jesus owned nothing at all, and the people around Him were not confused about whether He had been provided for, and He was at that table before the pen went down.