The Inventory I Never Finish

Merle has started that list about nine times in four years and it is in a drawer in the kitchen in nine different states of not being finished.

It began because of insurance and then it stopped being about insurance somewhere in the second attempt.

He always starts the same way. The ground, by parcel, which takes a page. Then the machinery, which he enjoys, and which takes another page and a half because he is thorough about serial numbers. Then the buildings. Then the stock.

And then he gets to a point, every single time, where the next thing to write down is not a thing, and he puts the pen down and does something else, and about five months later he starts again from the ground.

He is seventy-one. He is not ill and there is no situation. He is in good health for a man who has done what he has done, and there is nothing hanging over that place.

He simply cannot get to the end of his own list, and he has begun to think that the reason is that he does not know what the second half looks like, and that nobody has ever shown him one.

What got him was a Sunday in February at a small funeral. Not family. A man he had known for fifty years and had never once had a real conversation with, and the son got up and said four things about his father, and none of them was land and none of them was equipment and one of them was that he never let anybody leave the house without eating.

He never let anybody leave the house without eating.

Merle sat in a cold church with his hat on his knee and had to look at the back of the pew in front, and he could not have explained it to one man in that county.

And the sentence that came to him, sitting there, had nothing to do with the machinery.

He thought: somebody stood up and read out that man's actual list in about ninety seconds, and there was not one item on it that I have ever written down about myself, and I would not know where to start.

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 a parcel number, not a serial number on a page and a half. A portion is the old table word for what gets set down in front of a man because he belongs 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 stop being a definition and turn into a list a man can actually finish.

And let me be plain about the first half of the list before we go further. Finish it. Do the insurance properly. There is nothing spiritual about a farm with no records and it would be a poor kind of article that suggested otherwise. If you are truly short, that is real and it wants a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that.

What I want to do is narrower. I want to show you the second half, and I would rather the word of God showed it, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed at what belongs on it.

The shortest complete inventory in the Bible

Lamentations is a book about a man who has lost everything he had, in public, all at once, and in the middle of it he writes his inventory. It is one line long.

The LORD is my portion, says my soul, therefore I will hope in him.Lamentations 3:24

I am not going to improve on that. It has been carried by the Holy Spirit to men who had nothing left for two and a half thousand years and it does not need my help.

But look at where he puts it, because that is what a man with a drawer full of unfinished lists needs to see. He does not write that line at the top, before the trouble, as a religious preface. He writes it in chapter three, after two full chapters in which he has described the loss in more detail than most people can stand to read.

He does the first list. All of it. Honestly, item by item, in the dark. And then he writes the second one, and the second one is one line, and it is complete.

You are not a man with nothing in the second half. You are somebody who has never once seen a completed second half, and who therefore has no idea what a finished one even looks like, and the written word does not scold anybody for that. It shows you one, in a single sentence, written by a man with worse reason to have nothing on it, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between reading a verse and being able to pick the pen back up.

And here is what is true of you tonight, before you touch that drawer. You have a portion and it is not on any of those nine pages. His word says the LORD is my portion, says my soul, present tense, first person, finished, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a fact a man can write down rather than a line he agrees with.

What the second half is made of

Think about what got you in that church. It wasn't grief. You knew that man for fifty years and never had a real conversation with him.

It was: he never let anybody leave the house without eating. It was ninety seconds of somebody's actual list, read out loud by his son, with nothing on it that would go on any form. You were starving to see what a second half looks like, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as morbid, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a man and not merely about him.

That is the honest thing under the nine attempts. It is not that you are avoiding anything. It is that a man who has never been shown a completed second list simply stops when the first one runs out, because the alternative is to invent a form nobody handed him, and no amount of thoroughness about serial numbers can fix that.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. There is a second list and it starts with a Person rather than with you. Jesus said He was the vine and that the branches have everything they have from being in Him, which is an inventory with one item at the top and everything else hanging off it, and He was in that pew before the son stood up.