The Cold of the Second Key

Nabil had carried that second key in his pocket for eleven days before he used it, and on the morning he finally used it the only thing he actually felt was how cold the metal was.

Nine years. The first shop had opened in a unit so small that the delivery man had to leave the crates on the pavement and Nabil had carried them in one at a time while people stepped around him. Nine years of six in the morning until nine at night. Nine years of his wife doing the books at the kitchen table after the children were asleep, with her reading glasses on, saying nothing about what she had given up.

The second shop was the whole plan. It had been the whole plan since a Tuesday in the first winter when he had worked out on the back of a delivery note what two of these would mean.

He went down at half past five to open it for the first time properly. The street was empty. The shutters on either side were still down. It was that pale hour where the light has not decided anything yet.

He put the key in and turned it and pushed the door open, and he stood there.

And he waited.

That is the part that nobody tells a man about. He waited, genuinely, the way you wait for a kettle in somebody else's house, and after a moment he understood he was doing it and felt slightly ashamed of himself and went and turned the lights on.

He was not unhappy. Unhappy would have been something to work with. He was empty. He had walked nine years down a long road and arrived at a good building on a good street with nothing in his chest at all.

What got him was the smell when he opened the back store, which was cardboard and dust and cold air, and which was, for reasons he could not have explained, exactly the smell of his uncle's back room in a town he has not seen since he was fourteen.

His uncle sold almost nothing. That was the family joke. What his uncle did was put the small stove on the moment anybody came through the door, and pull out a stool, and say, before hello, before anything: sit, sit. The tea is coming. Tell me how it is with you.

Sit. The tea is coming. Tell me how it is with you.

Nabil stood in the back store of his own second shop with the key still in his hand and found that his eyes had gone, and he could not have explained it to any person on that street.

He opened at seven. It was a good day. And the sentence that arrived, walking home in the evening, had nothing to do with the shop.

He thought: I have spent nine years building somewhere to keep things, and what I wanted was somewhere to be received.

Let me say the word properly first

Before we go on I want to be plain about what this site means by wealth, because the word is slippery and I would rather be clear than clever with a man walking home in the evening.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a second unit, not a total. A portion is the old table word for what is set down in front of a person 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 it is not a smaller helping put in front of the people who did not get the real thing.

And let me be as plain in the other direction. Money is not wicked, building a business is not a sin, and wanting the second shop is not unspiritual. Nothing on this page ties what God does to what you have or to what you give, and that wire does not exist here and never will. 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 deserves a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that. Nothing here is a rebuke for wanting the shutters to go up on a second door.

What I want to do is narrower. I want to name what you were waiting for in that doorway, and I would rather the word of God named it, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed at it.

A house, not a holding

David writes three lines in the thirty-sixth psalm that are not about ownership at all. They are about being received, and the Holy Spirit has been carrying them to tired people ever since.

How precious is your steadfast love, O God! The children of mankind take refuge in the shadow of your wings. They feast on the abundance of your house, and you give them drink from the river of your delights. For with you is the fountain of life; in your light do we see light.Psalm 36:7-9

Notice whose house it is. Not theirs. The whole picture is people eating well in somebody else's home, which is the oldest and warmest picture there is, and which is completely different from the picture of a man standing in a building he has finally managed to acquire.

There is no shame in the acquiring. He does not say a word against it here. He simply puts a different scene in front of you: a table that was set before anybody arrived, and a host who is glad, and guests who are not being charged.

You are not a man who cannot enjoy what he has built. You are a person who has been hungry for a house and has spent nine years building a holding, which is an honest mistake made by serious people, and the written word treats the hunger as right rather than as greed. 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 psalm about wings and a river and lands it in a back store at half past five in the morning.

What nine years could not do

Think about what actually got you in that store room. It wasn't the building. The building is good, the street is good, and nine years of six in the morning are in that door.

It was the smell of cardboard and an old man putting a stove on. It was sit, sit, the tea is coming, tell me how it is with you. You were hungry to be received, and you still are, and there is nothing soft or foolish anywhere in that.

And you have a portion right now, on that walk, before one thing about the second shop changes. His word says the Lord is the portion of His people, present tense, not pending, not scheduled for whenever the takings settle, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a fact in a street rather than a phrase in a book.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. You were never nine years away from being somebody worth putting the stove on for. God has had the tea coming the entire time. Jesus was a guest more often than He was a host in the Gospels, and He accepted hospitality from people the neighborhood had written off, and He was in that doorway at half past five before the key went in.