The Inventory I Never Wrote

Daniel keeps lists the way other people breathe, and there is one list he has been composing in his head for about six years and has never once put on paper.

He is not disorganized. That is what makes it strange. He has a folder for the car and a folder for the flat and a spreadsheet he genuinely enjoys. He knows what is in the loft. He is the person in his family who is rung when a document cannot be found, and he finds it, usually within four minutes.

The list he has never written is the other one. Everything he would still be if nothing with a value on it were there.

He has begun it in his head many times, usually late, usually walking. He gets three or four items in and stops. He has never once got as far as writing anything down, and he could not have told you why until about a month ago.

Because a month ago he tried. He sat down with a pen, actually sat down, at a table, on purpose, and wrote a heading, and then he sat there with the pen in his hand and could not put a single line under it.

And what he understood, sitting there, is that he was afraid it would be short.

Not that it would be empty. He is not in despair and this is not a crisis. Just short. Four or five things, in a column, on a page that is mostly white, and he would have to look at it.

Nothing is wrong. The work is fine, the family is well, he is not in trouble of any kind. This is a Tuesday problem and it has been a Tuesday problem for six years.

What got him was his brother-in-law, who is not a reflective man and who was helping him move a wardrobe. They were on the stairs, in the awkward part, and the man said, entirely by way of conversation and not looking at him: you know you're the one everybody rings when it's bad, right? Not when it's complicated. When it's bad. There's a difference and you're the second one.

You're the second one.

Daniel stood on a staircase holding the bottom of a wardrobe and had to say let me get a better grip so that he could stop for a second, and he could not have explained it to anybody in that house.

And the sentence that arrived, standing there, had nothing to do with the wardrobe.

He thought: I have been afraid to write that list for six years, and somebody just put a line on it that I would never have thought to write about myself.

Say the word properly first

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 man sitting in front of a blank page.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a total, not what is in the loft. 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 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 let me be plain about what this article will not do. It will not predict anything. Nothing here is warning you that the first list is at risk, and nothing here uses the fear of losing any of it to move you, because leaning on a man's fear to teach him something true is a cheap way to do an honest job. Your folders are fine. Keep the spreadsheet. If you are genuinely short, that is real and deserves 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 sit with you in front of that blank page, and I would rather the word of God did the sitting, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed at what is on it.

Stability and treasure, in one sentence, neither of them in a vault

Isaiah writes one verse in the middle of a chapter about a city under threat that puts four nouns in a row, and the Holy Spirit has been carrying it to careful men ever since.

And he will be the stability of your times, abundance of salvation, wisdom, and knowledge; the fear of the LORD is Zion's treasure.Isaiah 33:6

Read the first phrase slowly. He will be the stability of your times.

Not He will make your times stable, which would be a promise about circumstances and would be a different sentence. He will be the stability. The steadiness is not a property of the times at all. It is a Person standing in them, and that is why it does not vary when the times do.

And then look at the last clause, because it is the definition this whole category is reaching for: the fear of the LORD is Zion's treasure. A city's treasure, named out loud, and it is not in a vault, and no army could carry it out through a gate, and there is no inventory in the world with a column that would hold it.

That is the second list. It is not short. It has never been short. You have been afraid to write it because you have been trying to write it in the same units as the first one, and the units do not convert.

You are not a hollow man for the blank page. You are somebody thorough enough to know that a list you cannot write is a list you are avoiding, and honest enough to sit down and try. The written word does not scold anybody for that, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between agreeing with a verse and being able to put a line under a heading.

And here is what is already true of you tonight, before you write one word. You are rich in the place that holds. His word says He is the stability of your times, present tense, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a settled fact in a man rather than a phrase he can quote.

What somebody else could see

Think about what got you on that staircase. It wasn't praise. Your brother-in-law was not praising you.

It was: not when it's complicated, when it's bad, and you're the second one. It was a plain description, offered by somebody with no agenda, of an item on your second list that you had never once thought to write. You were starving to have that list read back to you by somebody outside your own head, 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 man and not merely about him.

That is the honest thing under the blank page. You were not afraid of what is on the list. You were afraid of grading it, and you were going to grade it against a spreadsheet, and you knew before you started that it would look thin next to a spreadsheet, because a spreadsheet is the only kind of accounting anybody ever taught you.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. The second list is longer than the first one and always has been. Jesus said not one sparrow is forgotten before God and that the hairs of a man's head are numbered, which is an accounting so detailed it makes a spreadsheet look careless, and He was on that staircase before your brother-in-law spoke.