Only Paper on the Porch

Ruth Ann had been waiting on that envelope for eleven years, and when it came she carried it out to the porch and sat down with it in her lap and did not open it for about twenty minutes.

The land had been in dispute since her daddy died. Not a dramatic dispute. A slow one, the kind that runs on letters and county records and a cousin who would not answer the phone. Eleven years of a folder on the top of the refrigerator getting thicker. Eleven years of a woman at a desk in town saying, kindly, these things take time.

She had told herself a great many things about the day it settled. She had told herself she would drive out and stand on the ridge. She had told herself she would finally sleep the night through. She had told herself, more than once and out loud in an empty kitchen, that she would feel like her daddy could rest.

The envelope came on a Wednesday, with the rest of the mail, between a flyer and a bill.

She opened it on the porch. It was correct. It was signed and it was hers and the whole eleven years fit on one page with a great deal of white space around it.

And she sat there and waited on it.

That is the part nobody warns a body about. She waited, genuinely, the way you wait on the pot to boil, and after a while she caught herself at it and felt about ten years old and set the paper on the rail.

She was not sad. Sad would have been something. She was level. Eleven years of climbing and she had come up onto a piece of ground that was perfectly flat and had nothing standing on it.

What got her was the porch swing making that noise it makes.

That is all. It has needed oil since before her daddy died and it has never had it, and it makes a sound like a question every time it goes back. And her daddy used to sit on that swing with his coffee and let it make that sound and say, without looking up, well, come on out here and tell me something.

Come on out here and tell me something.

Ruth Ann sat on her own porch with the settlement on the rail beside her and found her eyes had gone, and she could not have told the mail carrier why if he had asked.

She went in and made supper for one and did not eat much of it. And the sentence that came to her, at the sink, had nothing to do with the land.

She thought: I have spent eleven years getting hold of the ground, and what I actually wanted was somebody on that swing.

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 an acreage, not a settlement. 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. It is not a smaller helping put in front of the folks who did not get the real thing.

And I want to be just as plain the other way. Money is not wicked. Getting what is rightfully yours is not a sin. Wanting the folder off the top of the refrigerator is not unspiritual, and nothing on this page ever ties what God does to what a body has or gives. That wire is not run here and it will not be. If you are truly short, if there is a date and a figure and a knot in your stomach, that is a real thing and it wants a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that. Nothing here is a scolding for wanting the thing settled.

What I want to do is smaller than that. I want to name what you were waiting on, out on that porch, and I would rather the word of God named it, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed.

What a body actually lives on

Moses says it to a whole nation that had just spent forty years being fed by hand, and he says it as an explanation rather than as a reprimand.

And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD.Deuteronomy 8:3

Read the last part slow. Man does not live by bread alone. He does not say bread is bad. He is standing in front of people He has personally fed every single morning for forty years. He is not against the bread. He is telling them what the bread was for.

And the manna is the argument. It came every morning and it could not be stored, and every attempt to hold a second day of it went bad by sunrise. That was not a punishment. That was a lesson taught with breakfast: what you actually live on comes fresh from a mouth, and a mouth belongs to a Person, and a Person has to be come to.

So you are not a woman who cannot be satisfied. You are a woman who was raised to believe the ground was the thing, and you went and got the ground, honorably, over eleven years, and there is not one word of correction in this article for a single one of them. What the written word says is simply what the manna said, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a body hear it on a porch as kindness instead of as a slap.

What the envelope could not carry

Think about what actually got you out there. It wasn't the page. The page is right and it stands up in a courthouse and it will still be right in thirty years.

It was that swing needing oil. It was a man with his coffee saying come on out here and tell me something. You were hungry to be asked, and you still are, and there is nothing childish anywhere in that.

And you have a portion right now, on that porch, before one thing about the deed changes. His word says the Lord is the portion of His people, present tense, not pending, not filed in town, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a fact in a house rather than a line in a book.

Here is what the word has settled about you, so His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. You were never eleven years short of being worth sitting out with. God has been out on that porch the whole time. Jesus cooked breakfast on a beach for men who had let Him down badly and did not say one word about it until they had eaten, and He was on the swing while the mail was still in your hand.