The Certificate in the Drawer

Cherisse had pictured the graduation about four hundred times over six years, and not one of those four hundred times had included the drawer.

Six years. Six years of a course done at night and at weekends and on the bus. Six years of a kitchen table covered in printouts that had to be moved every time anybody wanted to eat. Six years of her aunt saying, in that voice, and when is this finishing, exactly.

The day itself was good. Genuinely good. Her mother cried in the row behind and made no attempt to hide it. Her nephew wore a tie for the first time in his life and complained about it for four hours. Somebody's cousin took two hundred photographs, most of them of the back of somebody's head.

They went for food afterward and it was loud and it was right and somebody paid the bill before she could argue about it.

And at about eleven that night she was home, in the quiet, still in the dress, and she took the certificate out of the cardboard tube and stood in her own front room holding it.

And she waited.

That is the part nobody prepares a person for. She stood there and waited for it, the way you wait for a kettle, and after a minute she realized what she was doing and felt ridiculous and opened the drawer under the television and put it in.

She was not sad. Sad would have been something to hold onto. She was thirsty. That is the only honest word for it. She had drunk something she had been walking toward for six years and it had gone down and changed nothing, and she was standing in her own front room at eleven at night as thirsty as she had been at the start.

What got her was the water glass on the arm of the chair.

Her grandmother used to keep one there. Not to drink. Her grandmother kept a glass of water on the arm of the chair for whoever came in, because in her house nobody was ever allowed to sit down and be asked what they wanted first. You sat, and there was water already there, and then somebody said: now. Talk to me.

Cherisse stood in a front room she pays for herself with a drawer closed on six years of work and found that her face had gone, and she could not have explained it to a single person at that table.

She hung the dress up. She sat down in the chair. And the sentence that arrived, in the dark, had nothing to do with the certificate.

She thought: I finished the whole thing, and I am still sitting here waiting for somebody to say now, talk to me.

Let me say the word properly

Before anything else 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 woman sitting in the dark in a graduation dress.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a qualification, not a step up. 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 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 smaller helping handed to the people who did not get the real thing.

And let me be just as plain the other way. Money is not wicked, wanting to move up is not a sin, and six years of night classes is not vanity. Nothing on this page ties what God does to what you have or to what you give, and that wire is not run here and 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 a better job.

What I want to do is narrower. I want to name the thirst that was still there at eleven, and I would rather the word of God named it, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed at it.

Two kinds of water, and one of them keeps sending you back

Jesus is sitting on the edge of a well in the heat of the day talking to a woman who came at noon precisely so she would not have to talk to anybody, and He says the sentence this whole site is built on.

Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.John 4:13-14

Look at what He does not do. He does not tell her the well is a waste of time. He does not suggest she was foolish to come for water. He is sitting on the well while He says it. The well is real, the water in it is real, and the whole town drinks from it, and it works exactly as advertised. It just sends everybody back tomorrow.

That is not a criticism of the well. That is a description of what kind of water it is.

You are not a woman who cannot be satisfied. You are a person who drank from a real well and found out what kind of water it was, and the written word calls that discovery rather than failure. I am not putting my own idea over you here. That is what Scripture says about it, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a conversation at noon in a hot country and lands it in a front room at eleven at night.

And notice the promise underneath it, because the grammar is everything. He does not say He will meet her at the well every day with a bucket. He says the water becomes a spring inside the person who drinks it. The supply moves in. That is why nothing you achieve was ever going to be able to do this, and it is why the certificate failing to do it is no reflection on you or on the six years.

What six years could not reach

Think about what actually got you in that chair. It wasn't the certificate. You earned it and it is real and nobody can take it off you.

It was a glass of water on the arm of a chair. It was a woman who set it down before anybody arrived so that nobody would ever have to ask. You were thirsty to be expected, and you still are, and there is nothing needy or small anywhere in that.

And you have a portion right now, in the dark, in a dress, before one thing about the job or the money or the next six years is decided. His word says the Lord is the portion of His people, present tense, not pending and not scheduled for a better season, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a fact in a front room rather than a phrase on a page.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. You were never six years away from being somebody worth expecting. God has had the glass on the arm of the chair the entire time. Jesus went out of His way through a region everybody else walked around, sat down tired at a well, and started the conversation Himself with a woman who was not expecting to be spoken to at all, and He was in your front room before the drawer closed.