The Loan Is Repaid

Noam saw the notification on a Wednesday afternoon and knew what it was before he opened it, and the amount was exact to the last unit, which told him everything about how his brother had been carrying it.

Four years. The loan was four years ago and it was not enormous and Noam had genuinely not been counting, and he would say that to anybody and it is true.

What is also true is that his brother has been counting for four years, and that this is the entire problem and always was.

There was no message with it. Not a word. Just the transfer, on a Wednesday, exact.

He rang. It went to voicemail, which it does now. He sent something short and warm and got back something short and polite about eleven hours later.

They see each other at family things. They are civil and they are pleasant and their children play together, and Noam's wife, who misses nothing, says that they now talk to each other the way two men talk when one of them has done work on the other one's house.

He has gone over it a hundred times. He does not think he did anything wrong when he lent it, and he does not think he did anything wrong in the four years, and he has been extremely careful never once to mention it, which he now suspects was its own kind of loud.

What got him was his daughter, who is fifteen and has no filter, who said in the car after a thing at their grandmother's: is it fixed now? With Uncle? Because he paid you.

And Noam said something about how it is complicated, and she said, in the way of a fifteen year old: so no, then.

So no, then.

Noam drove the rest of the way and did not put anything on the radio, and he could not have explained it to a single person at that gathering.

And the sentence that arrived, driving, had nothing to do with the amount.

He thought: the account is closed and the room is not, and I have spent four years being careful about the wrong one.

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 driving home with the radio off.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a loan repaid to the last unit, not four years finally squared. 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 two things before we go a step further. Nothing on this page suggests the money was a lesser thing or that you were wrong to want it back, and nothing on this page will say one word against your brother, who I do not know, and who paid what he owed to the last unit, which most people do not do. The repayment was a real answer to a real problem and it worked, and I am glad of it and so is God.

And this article will not tell you to declare anything over that man. His will belongs to him and to God, and no page on this site will teach anybody to speak over another human being's choices, however lovingly it might be meant. What I want to do is much narrower. I want to name what did not come back with the transfer, and I would rather the word of God named it, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed at it.

Wounds, not accounts

There is a single line in the hundred and forty-seventh psalm, sitting in the middle of a passage about stars and about a city being rebuilt, and it is one of the most physical things ever said about God.

He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.Psalm 147:3

Notice the two verbs, because they are not the same verb.

Heals is what happens over time and out of sight. Binds up is what somebody does with their hands, immediately, to a wound that is open, and it does not close anything by itself. It holds a thing together while the healing happens somewhere underneath, and it has to be done again.

And notice what is being treated. Not a dispute. Not a balance. A wound, which is a word about damage rather than about arithmetic, and it sits in a psalm surrounded by God counting stars, which is the psalmist's way of saying that the same attention goes to both.

That is why the Wednesday could not fix it. A transfer closes an account, correctly, exactly, to the last unit. It has no relationship at all to a wound, and it was never designed to, and that is not a failure of your brother's payment.

You are not bitter. You are somebody with an open thing in his own family who has been careful for four years and has just discovered that careful was not the same as healed, and the written word does not scold anybody for that. It names wounds separately from accounts, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between agreeing with a psalm and being able to sit in a room.

And here is what is true of you tonight, before anybody rings anybody. You are met where the money could not reach. His word says He binds up their wounds, present tense, ongoing, a thing He does with His hands, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a settled fact in a body rather than a line in a psalm.

What did not come back

Think about what got you in that car. It wasn't the question. A fifteen year old asks forty questions.

It was: so no, then. It was somebody with no diplomatic apparatus whatsoever putting the true state of it into three words, in a car, after a family gathering where everybody had been perfectly pleasant. You were starving to have it said out loud rather than managed, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as bitterness, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a man and not merely about him.

That is the honest thing under the Wednesday. It is not the money and it was never really the money. It is that something between two brothers got damaged four years ago and has been kept scrupulously tidy ever since, and the arrival of an exact amount could not touch it, and no arrival of any amount ever will.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. Your part of this is a wound, and wounds are what He is described as attending to with His hands. Jesus wept over a city that was not going to receive Him, which means He did not require a good outcome in order to grieve honestly, and He was in that car for the whole drive.