The Morning After the Deed

Wendell had been telling people for nineteen years that he would sleep better when it was his, and on the first morning that it was his he woke at ten past four the same as always.

The paperwork had come through on a Thursday. There was no ceremony to it. A woman at a desk in town slid a folder across and said that is you all done then, and he said much obliged, and he walked out onto the street and stood there for a second like a man who has come out of a shop and forgotten what he went in for.

He drove the whole way back with the radio off. Nineteen years. Nineteen years of a payment that came out on the eighth of the month, of two winters he would rather not go over again, of a stretch in the middle when he took a second job hauling for a fellow up at Clayborne and slept in the truck twice a week for most of a spring.

He put the folder on the kitchen table where he could see it. He went out and did the evening the way he did every evening. He came back in and he looked at the folder some more.

And in the morning he got up at ten past four and made the coffee in the same pot, and it tasted like the coffee.

He sat there in the dark with it, in the same chair, at the same table, in a kitchen that was now, in every legal sense a person could name, entirely his own. And he waited for it.

That is the piece nobody warns a man about. He sat there and waited, honest to goodness, the way you wait on a kettle, and after a while he caught himself doing it and felt foolish about it and got up to feed the dog.

He was not sad. Sad would have been something. He was level. He had walked a road for nineteen years and come out on a perfectly good stretch of level ground with nothing standing on it.

What got him, and it got him about six, was the memory of his father's hand on the back of a kitchen chair.

That is all it was. His father never sat down first. He would come in from the cold, put his hand on the back of the chair opposite, and say, well now. Tell me how it went. And then he would sit, and he would stay sat until it had been told.

Wendell stood at his own window with a cup going cold in his hand and found his eyes had gone, and he could not have told a living soul why.

And the sentence that arrived, when it finally did, had nothing to do with the folder.

He thought: I have spent nineteen years making sure of a place, and I never once asked who was going to sit down in it with me.

Let me 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 total, not an acreage. 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 picks up that plain word and does something startling with it: God says of certain people that He Himself is their portion. That is the only sense the word carries here, and it is not a smaller helping handed out to folks who did not get the real thing.

And let me be just as plain the other direction. Money is not wicked. Owning your place outright is not a sin. Wanting out from under a payment is not unspiritual, and nothing on this page ever ties what God does to what a man has or gives. That wire is not run here and it will not be. If you are truly short, if there is a date and a figure and a knot in your gut, that is a real thing that wants a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that. Nothing here is a scolding for wanting the load lighter.

What I want to do is narrower. I want to name what you were waiting on at ten past four, and I would rather the word of God named it, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed at it.

What a life consists of

Jesus says it in one sentence, and He says it as a warning to a crowd rather than as an insult to a man.

Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.Luke 12:15

Read the second half slow, because that is the part that does the work. He does not say possessions are wicked. He does not say a man is wrong to want a roof that belongs to him. He says a life is not made out of that material. It is a statement about what a thing is built of, the way you might say a barn does not consist of paint.

Nineteen years of the eighth of the month was not greed. It was a man doing hard, honest, unglamorous work to make sure of something, and there is no shame anywhere in this article for a single one of those winters.

You are not being corrected for the work. You are being told what the work could and could not build, and that is what the written word says, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a man hear it at his own table as a kindness rather than as a slap.

And you have a portion already, this morning, in the dark, before anything about the folder changes. His word says the Lord is the portion of His people, present tense, not pending, not filed in town, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a fact in a kitchen instead of a line in a book.

What you were actually waiting on

Think about what got you at six. It was not the chair. Anybody can buy a chair.

It was the hand on the back of it. It was a man coming in from the cold and choosing, before he even sat, to say well now, tell me how it went. You were waiting on somebody to sit down with. You still are.

Half the men carrying that morning are carrying it as proof of some fault in themselves, some inability to be pleased, some crack that runs all the way down. It is nothing of the kind. Scripture treats that hunger as the most reasonable thing about a person and then does what no deed can do: it puts a Person on the other side of the table. His Spirit was not sent to explain the ache to you. He was sent because the ache was right.

So the folder could not carry the load you put on it. It was never a hand on a chair back. It is a good thing, honestly got, and it was asked to do a job it was never built for, and a thing failing at a job it was never built for is no judgment on the man who built it.

Here is what the word has already settled, so His Spirit can settle it in you: you were never nineteen years short of being worth sitting down with. You were sat down with the whole way. God did not stand at the far end of those winters with His arms folded waiting to see if you would make it. He came to a stable, and He ate with the sort of people the town had opinions about, and He was in the room at ten past four this morning before the coffee was poured.