The Night the Last Payment Cleared

Dana had been planning that Tuesday for four years, and she had never once planned as far as the washing up.

She knew the date before it arrived. She had known it for months, the way you know a birthday. The last payment would go out on the Tuesday, and after that there would be nothing left to go out, and the account that had been quietly eating one evening a month of her life since she was thirty-one would simply close.

She had imagined it a hundred times. She had imagined ringing her sister. She had imagined putting music on, the loud kind, the kind you have to apologize to a neighbor for afterward. She had imagined standing in her own front room with her arms up like somebody had scored.

The Tuesday came. The payment went. She refreshed the page twice because the first time she did not trust it, and there it was, closed, done, finished, four years of Tuesdays folded up and put away.

Dana sat on the arm of the sofa and waited.

That is the part nobody tells you about. She actually waited, the way you wait for the kettle, and after a minute or two she noticed she was doing it and felt slightly foolish and got up.

She heated the rice from Sunday. She ate it standing at the counter, because sitting down felt like too much of an occasion for rice. She watched most of an episode of something she had already seen. At some point she realized she had not rung anybody, and that she did not especially want to, and that she could not have said why.

She was not sad. Sad would at least have been a feeling. She was flat. She had climbed a set of stairs for four years and arrived on a perfectly clean landing with nothing on it.

At about half past nine she was rinsing the bowl, and her mother's freezer arrived in her head out of nowhere.

That is all it was. A freezer in a small kitchen in a house that has not been her mother's house for six years now. Her mother would come in from a shift, kick her shoes into the corner, open that freezer and say, without turning around, there is ice cream, get two spoons.

Two spoons. Not one bowl for Dana while her mother did the accounts standing up. Two spoons, and the tub between them on the table, and her mother saying: right. Tell me everything.

Dana stood at her own sink with a bowl in her hand and found that her face had gone, and she could not have explained it to anybody who asked.

She dried her hands. She turned the television off without finishing it. And the sentence that came, when it finally came, was not about the money at all.

She thought: I have spent four years clearing a space, and I never once stopped to ask what I was clearing it for.

Let me say the word properly first

Before anything else I want to be plain about what this site means by the word wealth, because it is a slippery word and I would rather be clear with you than clever.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance. Not an amount, not a figure, not a direction of travel. A portion is the old word for what is set on your plate at a table because you belong at that table, and Scripture has the astonishing habit of saying that God Himself is a person's portion. That is the only sense the word carries on these pages. It is not a smaller, sadder version of the other meaning, handed out to people who did not get the real thing.

And let me be equally plain about the other side. Money is not wicked. Having it is not a sin. Wanting relief from real pressure is not unspiritual, and nothing on this page ties what God does to what you have or to what you give. That wire does not exist here and it never will. If you are genuinely short, if there is a bill with a date on it and a knot in your stomach that goes with it, that is a real thing that deserves a real answer, and there is a site in this family built for exactly that, impossibleharvest.com. Nothing here is a scolding for wanting your circumstances to change.

What I want to do is much narrower than that. I want to name the hunger you felt at the sink, and I would rather the Holy Spirit did the naming than that I guessed at it.

The hunger was telling the truth

Here is the thing I most want you to hear, and I want to say it before anything else, because most people carrying that Tuesday are carrying it as a fault.

You are not a person who cannot enjoy things. You are a longing soul, which is a phrase Scripture uses on purpose, and the written word never once treats that longing as a defect. I am not putting my own idea over you here. That is what the word says about you, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line written thousands of years ago and lands it in a kitchen on a Tuesday night. The flatness was not evidence against you. It was information, and it was accurate.

For he satisfies the longing soul, and the hungry soul he fills with good things.Psalm 107:9

Look at what that sentence assumes before it promises anything at all. It assumes a longing soul exists. It assumes hunger. It does not open by correcting the hunger, shrinking it, or suggesting that the hungry person should have wanted less. It looks at a hungry soul and says: that one. That is who this is for.

And here is the quiet thing that convinced me long before I could defend it to anybody. A hunger is a very strange thing to have if there is nothing anywhere that answers it. Bodies get hungry in a world that contains bread. People get thirsty in a world that contains water. It is at least worth sitting with the possibility that a hunger which nothing on the shelf has ever touched is not a malfunction but a signpost, and that it is pointing at something real.

I am not asking you to be convinced of that tonight. I am asking you to stop treating your own hunger as the problem.

What you were actually clearing the space for

You have a portion already, and the reason you cannot feel it yet is not that it is small. It is that you have been checking the wrong container for it. His word does not say He fills the hungry soul with an outcome. It says He fills it with good things, Himself first among them, and it is His Spirit who does the filling rather than the arithmetic in any account anywhere.

Think about what actually undid you at the sink. It was not the ice cream. Anyone can buy ice cream. It was the second half of the sentence: two spoons, and the tub on the table, and somebody sitting down opposite you saying tell me everything.

You were hungry to be sat down with. You still are. That is not a small want dressed up as a spiritual one, and it is not a childish thing to have carried out of a kitchen that no longer exists. It is the oldest hunger there is, and God's answer to it has never once been to send a hamper and go. He sets a table and He takes the chair opposite. Scripture says He prepares it Himself, and the Spirit is how a person comes to know the difference between being provided for and being sat with.

That is why the last payment could not carry what you asked it to carry. It was never a chair. It was a door closing on four hard years, which is genuinely worth something, and it was being asked to do a job it was never built for.

And here is what the word settles about you, so the Spirit can settle it in you: what you have in Him is yours now, in the present tense, not held anywhere, not pending, not scheduled for a Tuesday. You were never a woman waiting to become worth sitting with. You were bought at a price and you were sat down with, and that has been true through every one of those four years, including the ones when nobody was watching you do it.