The Number I Set Myself

Rob had written the figure on the back of an envelope when he was twenty-nine, and he still had the envelope, which tells you most of what you need to know about Rob.

It was not a fantasy figure. That was the point of it. He had sat at a kitchen table in a flat with a boiler that only worked if you hit it, and he had worked out, carefully, with a pen, the amount at which a person like him would be able to stop worrying. He had underlined it twice. He had put the envelope in a drawer and he had gone to work.

Seventeen years. Seventeen years of the sort of decisions nobody claps for. Two moves he did not want. A job he stayed in eleven months longer than he should have because leaving would have cost. A holiday canceled the week his daughter turned four, which he has apologized for maybe forty times since and which she does not remember at all.

And on a Thursday in March he was on the train home, half reading something, and he checked, the way you check, and he saw that the figure from the envelope had been passed.

He read it twice.

And then, on a moving train, in about the space of four seconds, and without deciding to do it, he worked out what the next figure would need to be.

That is the part that stayed with him. Not the passing of it. The four seconds. He watched his own mind arrive at the finish line, look around, and immediately paint a new one further out, with the same underlining and the same certainty, and he had no more say in it than he would have had in a sneeze.

He got off at his stop. He walked up the hill. He did not tell his wife, and he could not have told you why not, except that saying it out loud would have required a feeling he did not have.

What got him was the smell of the hall when he opened the front door, because his daughter was making something and had burnt part of it, and she shouted from the kitchen, without coming out, dad, come here, I need you to taste this and tell me the truth.

Come here. Taste this. Tell me the truth.

Rob stood in his own hallway with his coat half off and the envelope figure passed and found that his eyes had gone, and he could not have explained it to one person on that train.

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

He thought: I have spent seventeen years chasing a line I drew myself, and it moved the second I got there, and nobody has ever moved that kitchen doorway.

Let me say the word properly first

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

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a target, not a line on the back of an envelope. A portion is the old table word for what is set down in front of a person because they belong at that table, and Scripture takes that ordinary 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 the people who did not reach their number.

And let me be just as plain the other way. Money is not wicked, planning is not a sin, and wanting to stop worrying is not unspiritual. Nothing on this page ties what God does to what you have or to what you give, and that wire does not exist here and never will. If you are genuinely short, if there is a date and a figure and a knot in your stomach, that is a real thing and it deserves a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that. Nothing here is a rebuke for having drawn a sensible line at twenty-nine.

What I want to do is much narrower. I want to name what happened in those four seconds, and I would rather the word of God named it, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed at it.

The line was always going to move

The Preacher says it in one sentence, three thousand years before anybody had an app to check on a train, and he says it as an observation rather than as an accusation.

He who loves money will not be satisfied with money, nor he who loves wealth with his income; this also is vanity.Ecclesiastes 5:10

Read it slowly, because it is easy to hear as a slap and it is not one. He does not say the man who has money is wicked. He says the man who loves it will not be satisfied by it, which is a statement about the nature of the substance rather than about the character of the person holding it. Water does not satisfy hunger. That is not a criticism of the thirsty.

So you are not a greedy man. You are a man who was told, by everybody, all your life, that the line was the thing, and you went and got the line, honorably, at real cost, for seventeen years. And here is what the written word says about what happened next, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a man hear it in a hallway as relief rather than as a verdict: the line moved because lines of that kind always move. It was never in your hands to make it stay.

And you have a portion right now, in that hallway, before one thing about the figure changes. His word says the Lord is the portion of His people, present tense, not pending, not scheduled for the next number, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a fact in a house rather than a phrase in a book. A portion does not move. That is the entire difference between the two words, and it is why one of them can be reached and the other one can be rested in.

What the envelope could not do

Think about what actually got you at the front door. It wasn't the figure. You'd passed it two hours earlier and it had barely registered.

It was a girl shouting from a kitchen. Come here, taste this, tell me the truth. Somebody wanting you in a doorway for no reason connected to what you had achieved on the way home. You were hungry to be wanted like that, and you still are, and that is not a soft want or a small one.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. You were never seventeen years short of being worth calling into a kitchen. God has been calling you into the kitchen the whole time. Jesus told a story about a father who ran, which is the least dignified thing a man of that time and place could have done, and He told it about someone who came home with nothing, and He was in that hallway with the coat half off before you got your eyes back.