The Kitchen Was Still Quiet

The message came through at twenty to eight, and by five past eight the kitchen was exactly as quiet as it had been at half past seven.

That is the thing nobody warns you about.

He had been carrying it for four months. It had a shape and a name and a date on it, and it had been sitting on his chest every morning at about ten to six, the way those things do, arriving before he was properly awake. He had done everything a person does. He had made the calls. He had not slept properly since March.

And then it was sorted. Genuinely, completely sorted, in a way he had not dared to plan for.

He sat down at the kitchen table. He read the message three times. He said thank You out loud to the ceiling, and he meant it, and he was not performing gratitude, he was flooded with it.

And then he waited for the rest of it to arrive.

Because there is a picture you carry of what you are like on the other side of a thing like that. In the picture you are lighter. You laugh at something on the radio. You go and stand in the garden. And he sat at that table for about eleven minutes waiting to become the man in the picture, and the man in the picture did not turn up.

The chair opposite him was still empty. The house was still the size it is at eight in the evening when there is nobody in it. Whatever had been sitting on his chest at ten to six was, he realized with something close to panic, still there, wearing a different coat.

The problem got solved and the ache stayed exactly where it was.

Now let me stop calling him he.

Because you have had your version of that evening. Maybe not money. Maybe it was the job coming through, or the result, or the person finally saying the thing you needed them to say. The relief was real. You are not making it up and you were not ungrateful.

And then the relief wore off at the speed relief wears off, and underneath it was something you had not looked at in a long time, because for four months you had been able to point at one problem and say, that.

Stay in the kitchen. This is not going to be a lecture about money.

The portion, which is not the balance

Let me say plainly what this site means by wealth, because the word gets used to mean something else nearly everywhere and I am not going to trade on the confusion.

Wealth here means your portion. Not your balance.

In the Old Testament, when the land was divided, every tribe got an allotment and the boundaries were measured with a line. Except one. The Levites were given no field at all, and the reason given is one of the strangest sentences in the Scriptures: the Lord Himself is their portion. Not as a consolation for missing out on the land. As the actual, literal share.

David picks that word up and does something extraordinary with it. He was a king. He had fields. He had everything a man of his time could measure, and he wrote:

The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup; you hold my lot.Psalm 16, verse 5

He is a man with land calling God his allotment.

That is what we mean, and it is not a spiritual consolation prize handed to people with nothing. It is the thing David reached for while holding a kingdom, because he had worked out early what most people work out late: an allotment can be measured and a portion cannot, and the two are not in competition.

Now bring that back to your kitchen at five past eight.

Here is what I am not going to say to you. I am not going to say you were wrong to want the money. You were not. It was a real problem, it had a date on it, and wanting it lifted was the sane and healthy response of a person who takes their responsibilities seriously. There is nothing unspiritual about relief and God was not standing back waiting for you to want it less. 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 what came was good. Whatever arrived, it was a good thing and it does not become a lesser gift because it did not reach further than it was ever sent to reach.

What happened at your table was not disappointment. It was disclosure.

For four months you had one problem with a name on it, and it was doing a job you did not know it was doing: it was standing in front of the other thing. As long as you could point at the date and the number, the ache underneath had a coat on. Solve the problem and the coat comes off, and what is standing there is what has actually been there for years.

You know what it is. You have known since about eleven minutes into that silence. That is not my opinion. It is what the word says, and His Spirit is the one who carries it.

It might be that you are lonely in a way you have never said out loud. It might be that you have not been known by anybody since a particular year. It might be that you are tired of being the one who sorts things, or that somebody is not in the chair opposite and no arrangement is going to put them back there.

Whatever it is, it is not a smaller need than the one that got met. It is the older one.

And here is the whole message: it is seen. It was seen while you were making the calls in March. God has not been waiting for you to finish being grateful before He deals with the real thing, and He is not annoyed that the relief did not last, because He knew the shape of the ache before you did and He measured your portion against that and not against your bank. The written word settles that, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it real in a body.