The Thing That Was Not on the Inventory

Wilma made the list at the kitchen table over two evenings, because the lawyer needed it and because making lists is what she does when there is nothing else to be done.

Her mother had been ninety-one and it had been coming for a long time and this is not a grief story. It has been two years. Wilma is all right and she would tell you so and she would mean it.

The list was thorough. She is thorough. Every stick of furniture, the two rings, the good dishes that nobody has used since 1978, the quilt, the sewing machine that still works, the tin box with the buttons, the deed to eleven acres of scrub that nobody has ever farmed and nobody is going to.

She read it over on the second evening and it was complete and correct, and she sat there in a house full of her mother's things with a complete and correct account of what her mother had left, and she thought: this is not it.

Not sadly. She wants that understood. It was the flat feeling of arithmetic that does not come out. Everything her mother owned was on that page and the thing her mother actually gave her was not on it anywhere, and Wilma could not have said in words that evening what the thing was.

What got her was about a month later.

Her granddaughter was staying, twenty-three, going through something, sitting at that same table at eleven at night not saying anything much. And Wilma did what she always does, which is she got up and put the kettle on and did not ask a single question, and she stood with her back to the girl and waited.

And the girl said, into the room: Grandma, you know Mom does this? The kettle thing? She doesn't ask either. She just puts the kettle on and stands there.

You know Mom does this.

Wilma stood at her own counter with her back to a girl who had just told her something, and had to hold onto the edge of it, and she could not have explained it to a living soul in that county.

And the sentence that came to her, standing there, had nothing to do with the eleven acres.

She thought: three women stand at a counter with their backs turned and put a kettle on and ask nothing, and not one lawyer on this earth would put that on a list.

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 an estate, not eleven acres of scrub. A portion is the old table word for what gets set down in front of a body because they belong at that table, and Scripture takes that plain word and does a startling thing with it: God says of certain people that He Himself is their portion. That is the only meaning the word carries here.

And let me say plain what this article will not do. It will not predict anything, and it is not going to lean on the fear of losing what you have got to make a point, because borrowing somebody's fear to teach them something true is a cheap way to do an honest job. Your house is fine. Money is not wicked and eleven acres of scrub is not a spiritual problem. If you are truly short, that is real and it wants a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that.

What I want to do is smaller. I want to name the thing that was not on your list, and I would rather the word of God named it, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed.

Paul names two women out loud

There is a line at the start of Paul's last letter that has no business being as ordinary as it is, and the Holy Spirit has been carrying it to women at kitchen tables ever since.

I am reminded of your sincere faith, a faith that dwelt first in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, dwells in you as well.2 Timothy 1:5

He is writing to a young man about the most important thing in that young man's life, and he traces it, by name, through two women, and he does it as though it were the most natural thing in the world to do.

Read the verb. Dwelt. It is a house word. It says the faith lived in Lois the way a person lives in a house, and then it lived in Eunice, and now, Paul says, it lives in you.

Nothing changed hands. There was no document. Nobody wrote out a list. It went across anyway, through years of ordinary rooms, and it was strong enough by the third generation that a man in a prison cell in another country could see it from where he was sitting.

You are not a cold woman for making a thorough list. You are somebody who was asked for one kind of account by a lawyer and then, sitting alone at a table, quietly noticed it was not the account. The written word does not scold anybody for that, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a name like Lois off a page and puts it in a farmhouse kitchen.

And here is what is already true of you this evening, before you do a thing about the deed. You are rich in the place that holds. His word says the faith dwelt first in a grandmother and now dwells in the third one down, present tense, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a settled fact in a woman rather than a nice piece of family history.

What went across without a document

Think about what got you at that counter. It wasn't the compliment. She was not paying you one.

It was: Mom does this, the kettle thing, she doesn't ask either. It was a girl of twenty-three describing, without knowing what she was doing, a thing your mother did to you before you had words for it, arriving in the third generation intact. You were starving to see something arrive, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as sentiment, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a woman and not merely about her.

That is the honest thing under the list. Everything your mother owned was on that page and the way she loved people was not, and there was no column for it, and you have never once in your life heard anybody call it wealth.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. The real estate went across two years ago and you have been living in it ever since without knowing you had been left it. Jesus left twelve men no property whatsoever, and what He handed over is still in the world, and He was in that kitchen while the kettle was coming up.