The Rent Is Paid and I Cannot Sit Down

Cristina noticed it on a Saturday, when she caught herself standing in the middle of her own front room doing absolutely nothing, the way you stand when you have heard a noise.

The rent had gone out on Friday. It had gone out fine. She had checked, and then she had checked again about an hour later for no reason she could name.

There is food in that kitchen. There is a bit in the account after everything, which is new, and which she has not spent because spending it would mean it was not there anymore. Her mother is well. Her sister has stopped ringing at odd hours. Her job is dull and steady and she is not going to lose it.

Nothing is coming.

And her shoulders are up around her ears, and they have been for so long that when a physiotherapist told her last year that she held tension in her neck she genuinely thought the woman was describing everybody.

There were four years, from when she was twenty-four, that she does not describe to people. Two jobs, and a room in a flat with a family in it who were kind but who were also five people in a small space, and a month in the middle where she genuinely did the sums about whether she could go home. She got through it. Everybody says she is strong.

And her body did not get the letter saying it was over.

What got her was her nephew's christening, of all places, in a hall afterward with paper cups. Her aunt, who is eighty-one and has never in her life said anything indirect, watched her stand by the wall holding a plate she was not eating from, and said: mija. Siéntate. Nobody here needs anything from you. Sit down and eat.

Sit down and eat.

Cristina stood in a parish hall with a paper plate in her hand and had to go and look out of a window for a while, and she could not have explained it to a single person in that room.

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

She thought: everything is fine and I am still standing by the wall in case somebody needs something, and I have been standing there since I was twenty-four.

Let me 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 woman standing by a wall.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a cushion, not a month that finally goes quiet. 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 this article is written for one particular reader, so let me name her exactly. She has enough this month and cannot feel it. If you are actually short, if the rent is the problem and your body is telling you the truth about it, then nothing on this page is asking you to relax about that, and an article that did would deserve to be thrown out. Real lack is real and it deserves a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that. What I want to look at is a body that will not stand down on a month when nothing is coming, and I would rather the word of God did the looking, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed.

Consider the ravens

Jesus says this to a crowd that was not comfortable, which matters, because it is often read as advice for people with nothing to worry about.

Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat, nor about your body, what you will put on. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing. Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds!Luke 12:22-24

Notice which bird He picks. Not a songbird. A raven, which in that culture was the unclean one, the scavenger, the bird nobody would have chosen as an illustration of anything.

And notice what He does not say. He does not say the ravens have a storehouse. He says they do not, and He says God feeds them anyway, which means the argument is not about their arrangements at all. It is about His character.

You are not a nervous woman who needs to calm down. You are somebody whose body did four years of genuine work and was never told the work had finished, and the written word does not scold anybody for that. It looks up at a bird instead, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between agreeing with a verse and a set of shoulders actually coming down.

And here is what is true of you this evening, before you know one thing about next year. You have today, and the word says the God who feeds ravens without a storehouse values you more than birds, and His Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a body.

What the standing by the wall is for

Think about what got you in that hall. It wasn't the food. You had a plate in your hand.

It was: siéntate, nobody here needs anything from you. It was an eighty-one year old woman noticing that you had walked into a party and taken up a post. You were starving to be told you could sit down, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as weakness, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a person and not merely about them.

That is the honest thing under the bracing. Your shoulders are not asking about the rent. They are listening for the sound of somebody needing something you do not have, and no amount in any account has ever been able to switch that listening off, which is exactly why a paid rent did not do it.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. You were never on duty. God did not put you on the wall. Jesus went to a wedding and stayed at it, and went to dinner at people's houses repeatedly, and He was in that parish hall with a paper cup before your aunt spoke.