The Drive Home After the Number

He had planned the drive home for about eleven years, and he had never once planned it as far as the second junction.

Wes had always imagined it the same way. The meeting ends. He walks out to the car park. He sits in the car for a moment with his hands on the wheel, and then he pulls out onto the road and puts something loud on and drives the whole way home in a state he had been describing to himself for over a decade without ever finding the right word for it.

The meeting ended at twenty past three. It went the way he had worked eleven years for it to go. Nobody made a speech. A man he did not like very much shook his hand and said well done and meant it, and that was that, and Wes walked out to the car park in the ordinary afternoon.

He sat in the car with his hands on the wheel.

And he waited.

That is the part nobody warns you about. He genuinely waited, the way you wait for a train that is running late, and after a while he noticed he was doing it and felt faintly embarrassed and started the engine.

Somewhere past the second junction he understood that it was not coming. Not delayed. Not muted by tiredness. Simply not a thing that was going to happen. And he was not sad, which would at least have been something. He was flat. He had arrived at the top of a ladder he had climbed for eleven years and found a perfectly pleasant landing with nothing on it.

He stopped at a services because he had to stop somewhere. He bought a sandwich in a triangle box and ate half of it standing up by the window with the lorries going past, and it tasted of nothing much, and he thought, with no warning at all, about his grandmother's kitchen.

Bread and butter. That is all it was. She cut it thick and she buttered it right to the edges and she put the plate down in front of you and then she sat down opposite with her own cup and she said: now then. Tell me about your day.

Wes stood in a motorway services holding half a sandwich and found that his eyes had gone, and he could not have told you why.

He got back in the car. He drove the rest of the way with nothing on the radio. And the sentence that arrived, somewhere on the last stretch, was not about the meeting at all.

He thought: I have been hungry for a very long time, and I have spent eleven years bringing the wrong thing to the table.

Say the word properly

Before anything else, let me say plainly what this site means by wealth, because the word is slippery and I would rather be clear than clever.

Wealth here is a portion. Not a balance. Not an amount. A portion is the old word for what is set aside and given to you at a table, the thing that is put on your plate because you belong there, and in Scripture God says of certain people that He Himself is their portion. That is the sense in which this word is used here and it is the only sense. It is not a smaller version of the other meaning and it is not a spiritual consolation for people who did not get the other thing.

And let me be equally plain about the other side of it. Money is not wicked, having it is not a sin, and wanting relief from real pressure is not unspiritual. If you are actually short, if there is a bill and a date and a knot in your stomach, that is a real thing and it deserves a real answer, and there is a site in this family built for exactly that, impossibleharvest.com, and it is the right place for it. Nothing here is a rebuke for wanting your circumstances to change, and nothing here ties what God does to what you have. That connection does not exist and it never will on this page. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land in a person rather than merely read true.

What I want to do is much narrower. I want to name the hunger you felt on the way home.

Because Isaiah asks it, in a passage that opens with the strangest invitation in the book, and he asks it without one gram of scorn.

Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.Isaiah 55:1-2

Hold the question in the middle, because it is the question you asked yourself past the second junction.

Why do you spend your labor for what does not satisfy?

Notice, first, that it is not an accusation. It is a genuine question asked by Somebody who is standing at a table with the food already out. And notice, second, what it says about you: it assumes you were hungry. It never suggests you were greedy, shallow or foolish. Hunger is not the fault in this passage. Hunger is the reason the invitation is worth shouting in the street. I am not putting my own idea over you: that is what the written word says, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes it land.

And then look at the arrangement, which is the most extraordinary economic sentence in the Bible and the reason it can be quoted safely on a site with a name like this one.

He who has no money, come, buy and eat. Without money and without price.

The table is not a market. Your capacity to pay is not consulted, not in either direction. The person who has nothing is at that table on the same footing as the person who has just come from a very good meeting, which means the one thing that has never once been the currency of God's kindness is the thing everybody assumes is the currency of everything.

So here is what I think happened to you on the way home, and I say it with real respect for the work you did.

You were not chasing the wrong thing because you are a shallow person. You were doing what a hungry person does, which is to bring the most substantial thing they can find to the table. And it turned out not to be bread. That is the whole of it. Not a moral failure, not a wasted decade, not a lesson you should have learned earlier. It was a good and serious effort by a hungry person who had been told, by everybody, all their life, that this was the food. That is not my opinion. It is what the word says, and His Spirit is the one who carries it.

And what your grandmother put in front of you was actual bread. But it was not the bread that undid you at that window, and you know it. It was the second half. She sat down opposite you. She had her own cup. She said: now then, tell me about your day.

You were hungry to be sat down with. You still are. And the God of Isaiah 55 is not a God who sends a hamper. He sets a table and takes the chair opposite. That is His Spirit at work in somebody, and never the wording.

God is doing this today, in ordinary cars and kitchens, for people who assumed the flatness meant something was wrong with them. He is doing it where you are. It is not for whoever you imagine is more content than you. It is for you, personally, exactly as that drive home actually felt.