Seventy-Nine and Everything Given Away

Nell did it over about four years, deliberately, one thing at a time, and she has not regretted a single item and she cannot answer a simple question.

She started at seventy-five, because a woman she knew died and left a house that took her children eighteen months and most of their goodwill toward each other to deal with, and Nell decided in about a fortnight that she would not do that to hers.

So she did it while she was alive and could see their faces.

The dresser went to her granddaughter, in person, with a story about where it came from. The rings went to the two of them in an afternoon that got quite emotional and quite funny. The land went into an arrangement that a solicitor set up properly and everybody understood. The pictures went round the family one by one over two Christmases.

She kept the house, which is not hers to keep forever and she knows it, and she kept the chair, and she kept about enough kitchen things for one woman.

She would do every bit of it again.

And in February her great-nephew, who is twenty and doing something at university about, of all things, estate law, asked her what her assets were. He meant it professionally and he was proud of the word.

And Nell said: well. And then she did not say anything else, and he changed the subject kindly, and she has been sitting with it since.

What got her was a Thursday. The woman who does her shopping, who is not family and has been doing it for six years and will not take anything for it, said as she was putting things in the cupboard, with her back turned: this is my favorite hour of my week. I have been meaning to tell you and it always sounds mad so I never do.

This is my favorite hour of my week.

Nell sat in her chair with her hands on the arms of it and had to look out of the window, and she could not have explained it to anybody in that family.

And the sentence that came to her, sitting there, had nothing to do with the dresser.

She thought: I gave away everything I had, on purpose, with joy, and I have been sitting here for four months unable to name a single thing I own, and somebody has just told me she comes for the hour.

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 estate, not a word a young man is proud of. 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 this is the piece where that has to be an answer a woman of seventy-nine can give out loud.

And let me say plain that nothing here is a criticism of that boy. He asked a proper question with a proper word and he is going to be good at his job. And nothing here is a criticism of what you did either. Giving it away while you could see their faces was wisdom and most people do not manage it.

What I want to do is much smaller. I want you to have an answer, and I would rather the word of God gave it, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I made one up for you.

You are being spoken to here rather than spoken about. The written word says it, and His Spirit is the one carrying it across.

No possession, and a possession

There is a line in Ezekiel about the priests, in a long and rather technical passage about a temple, and it is one of the most personal sentences in the book.

This shall be their inheritance: I am their inheritance: and you shall give them no possession in Israel; I am their possession.Ezekiel 44:28

I am not going to improve on that. The Holy Spirit has kept it for people with empty houses and full lives for a very long time.

But read it twice, because it says the same thing in two different words on purpose, and the second word is the one that answers a boy with a clipboard.

Inheritance is about what comes to you. Possession is about what is yours now, in your hand, on a Thursday, and it is exactly the word he was reaching for.

And God does not soften it. He does not say give them a small possession as well, to be going on with. He says give them none, and then, in the same breath, in the first person: I am their possession.

That is not a consolation for people who have nothing. It is a different entry in a different column, put on the record deliberately, and it is written in the same technical passage as all the measurements.

You are not a woman with nothing. You are somebody who gave everything away on purpose and was then asked a question in a vocabulary that has one column in it, and the written word does not scold anybody for being unable to answer that. It supplies the other entry, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between reading it and being able to say it to a twenty year old.

And here is what is true of you this afternoon, in that chair, before anything about the house is decided. You have a portion and it is a possession. His word says I am their possession, in the first person, present tense, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a settled fact in a woman rather than a technical verse in Ezekiel.

What is in the house

Think about what got you in that chair. It wasn't the shopping. She has been doing the shopping for six years and you have thanked her about three hundred times.

It was: this is my favorite hour of my week, and I never say it because it sounds mad. It was somebody with her back turned, putting tins in a cupboard, naming a thing that is in your house and is not on any inventory and has been there every Thursday for six years. You were starving to be told what is in this house, 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 four months. It is not regret and it never was. It is that a whole way of counting arrived through an innocent question, and you had no second column, and you have spent four months sitting in a house full of things that column cannot see.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. What is in that house is a possession and it is not intangible. Jesus said a woman who had put in almost nothing had put in more than everybody, which is a valuation in a currency the treasury could not read, and He was in that chair with you when the boy said assets.