Of Your Own Have We Given

Bess is seventy-four and she keeps the number in the third drawer down, and she has never once called it a ledger, and it is a ledger.

It started as a note about a repair. Then it was two notes, and then it was a small book with a rubber band round it, and now it is nine years of what she has done for that side of the family, in her own handwriting, with dates.

She would tell you it is for tax. It is not for tax. There is nothing in it that any authority on earth would want.

It is a count.

She did not decide to start it and she cannot remember the moment it stopped being a note and became what it is now. That is the part that has been bothering her since about March, when her grandson stayed for the weekend and asked what the book was, and she heard herself say, in a voice that did not sound like her: nothing, love. Just some things.

She lied to a nineteen year old about a book in a drawer.

And after he went home she sat at that table for a good while and thought about the kind of woman who keeps a private tally of her own kindnesses and lies about it, and she did not much care for that woman.

She has not thrown it away. She has picked it up twice since March and put it back.

What got her was Easter. The whole family in that house, twenty-two people, and her son's wife, who Bess has never entirely got the measure of, was doing the washing up and said, over her shoulder, without any particular weight: you know, everything in my house that works, works because of you. The cooker, the boy's college, the roof. I have never known how to say it, so I have not said it, and I am saying it now while my hands are wet so I do not have to look at you.

While my hands are wet so I do not have to look at you.

Bess stood in her own doorway with a tea towel over her shoulder and had to go back into the hall for a minute, and she could not have explained it to a living soul in that house.

And the sentence that came to her, standing in that hall, had nothing to do with the book.

She thought: it has been counted the whole time by somebody else, in a house I do not live in, and I have been keeping my own copy in a drawer like a woman who does not believe it.

Say the word plain

Before we go on I want to say plain what this site means by wealth, because it is a slippery word and I would rather be understood than admired.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not nine years of repairs, not what is written in a book with a rubber band round it. A portion is the old table word for what gets set down in front of a body because they belong at that table, and Scripture takes that plain word and does a startling thing with it: God says of certain people that He Himself is their portion. That is the only meaning the word carries here.

And here is the paragraph that matters most, said plain. There is no ask on this page. Nothing here suggests you give anything to anybody, there is no link and no cause anywhere in it, and this site will never once tell you that giving produces a return, in any form, however gently it is put. That wire is not run here and it never will be. You have carried that family for nine years. That is between you and them and God, and this article has one interest in it: the book in the third drawer down.

That is the whole job. Not to grade what you have done, and not to tell you to burn the book. To sit at the table with you, and I would rather the word of God sat there, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed at what that book is for.

A king closes his own ledger in front of everybody

There is a prayer at the end of First Chronicles that David prays out loud in front of the whole assembly, right after the largest collection in the Old Testament, and it is the strangest possible thing for a man in that position to say.

But who am I, and what is my people, that we should be able thus to offer willingly? For all things come from you, and of your own have we given you.1 Chronicles 29:14

Read what he does with the tally.

He has just given more than anybody, publicly, at the end of his life, for a building he was told he would never see finished. If ever a man had a reason to keep a small book in a drawer, it was that one.

And he stands up and says: of your own have we given you.

Not out of modesty. Look at the sentence: it is an argument, not a mood. All things come from you. Therefore the thing I handed over was already yours before it reached my hand, and what I have actually done is move something of yours from one place to another place, and there is no column in the world that can hold that as a credit to me.

That is not a rebuke to a woman with a book. It is the only thing that has ever successfully closed one.

You are not a small woman for the third drawer down. You are somebody who started a note about a repair and watched it become something else, and did not choose it, and has been quietly ashamed of it since March. The written word does not scold anybody for that, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between agreeing with a king's prayer and being able to open a drawer.

And here is what is true of you tonight, before you decide anything about the book. You are provided for and your hands are open. His word says all things come from Him, present tense, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a settled thing in a body rather than a line in an old prayer.

What the counting was actually for

Think about what got you in that hall. It wasn't the thanks. You have been thanked, awkwardly, over nine years.

It was: while my hands are wet so I do not have to look at you. It was somebody you have never quite got the measure of naming three things in a row and then telling you exactly how hard it was to say. You were starving to know that it had been counted somewhere other than in your own handwriting, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as vanity, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a woman and not merely about her.

That is the honest thing under the book. It was never a case being built against that family. It was a woman with no way of knowing whether any of it had registered anywhere, keeping the only record she could keep, in the only place she had.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. It has been recorded the whole time and not by you. Jesus said the Father sees what is done in secret, which means the record was never yours to maintain, and He was in that hall while you were standing in it with a tea towel.