The Things That Were Not on the Film

The renewal letter said a video walkthrough was acceptable, so on the Sunday he did one.

Phone held out in front of him like a man following a torch beam. Front room first, slowly, along the wall so the sofa and the two chairs were in it. The television. Pan left, the bookcase, the little cabinet his wife's mother left them. Then the kitchen, opening cupboards, saying the make of the washing machine out loud for the microphone because a friend had told him to.

Upstairs. Both bedrooms. The bathroom, which took nine seconds. The box room, where he had to say sorry about the mess to nobody.

Seven minutes and forty seconds. He sat down on the bottom stair afterwards, with his coat still on for some reason, and watched it back.

And he could not have told you why, but by the end of it he was sitting there with his eyes wet, holding a phone showing a still frame of his own landing carpet.

Because he had just made a complete visual record of the whole of it, and none of it was in there.

Not the sound his wife makes when she genuinely laughs, the one she is embarrassed about. Not the Sunday his son came back and stood in the doorway of that kitchen and said nothing for a full minute. Not the last half hour with his father, when they also said nothing, and which he would not trade for the entire contents of the film.

Seven minutes and forty seconds of everything he owns, and not one thing he could not live without.

That is you, on the bottom stair with your coat on.

There may be no renewal letter in yours. But you have asked yourself, in some quiet form, what would actually be left of you if the measurable things stopped being there, and you did not like how long you had to think about it.

So let me say plainly, right at the start, what this article means by wealth, because the word has been used to sell people things and I am not doing that to you. On this page, wealth means your portion. What is actually yours, in the sense that it is in your hand and in your name and is not a projection. And the whole of what follows is one claim: that you have a portion which has never appeared on any list, and which has never once been at risk.

There is an address the film could not reach

Here is the sentence, and it is nine words long in most translations, and it says something about where you actually live.

For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.Colossians 3:3

The Holy Spirit has been carrying that one line to people who could not answer the question for two thousand years.

Hidden.

Not stored. Not held somewhere and hoped for. Not written down against your name on a document that somebody in an office could lose. Hidden, which is a word about location, and the location given is not a place at all. It is a Person, inside a Person.

And notice the thing about hidden that we always get backwards. We hear it and think of something we cannot get at, something withheld or out of reach. But nobody hides a thing they do not care about. Hidden is what you do with what is precious. Hidden means kept, kept means safe, and safe means that the ordinary hazards of a life, all of them, every single one, are addressed to a building the item is not in.

So walk the phone round that address for a second. Nothing has ever gone missing from it. No letter has arrived about it. Nothing in it has ever depreciated, and nothing that has happened to you in fifty years has removed one gram from it.

That is a portion. That is wealth in the only sense this site ever uses the word: not a balance, and not a projection, but the thing you actually have.

Now, hear the other half, because I am not going to let this article do what these articles usually do. Nothing here says the things on that film do not matter. They do. The washing machine matters when it goes. The chairs matter. Wanting your life to be easier is not a small or unspiritual thing to want, and if things are tight for you tonight, that is real, and nobody worth listening to would answer it with a lecture about contentment.

And I am not telling you that having is bad or that going without is holy. Neither of those is true, both of them have done a great deal of damage, and I have no interest in either.

What is being offered is not less. It is a second inventory. Everything on the film, plus the thing the film could not see, and the second one is the one that was never on the market.

Because here is the wisdom underneath the verse, and it will land harder than anything I could say about money: what can be counted can be lost, and what is kept in Christ was never in the room to begin with. Both halves are true at once. You do not have to be frightened of the first to be glad about the second.

I am not going to work you up with a picture of losing it all. That is a cheap way to make a person feel spiritual for an evening and it wears off by Wednesday, and fear has never once made anybody rich toward God. This is not about what might happen. It is about what already is.

You are already rich in one place. Tonight. With the coat still on. I am not putting my own idea over you: that is what the written word says, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes it land.