What Came With Us

Yusuf asked his grandmother the question at a wedding, of all places, at about eleven at night, when everybody else had stopped paying attention to either of them.

He is thirty-eight. He runs a business that took him eleven years to build, and he is good at it, and the last two years have been the best two. He is not in trouble. He wants that stated clearly at the front, because the question he asked her sounds like the question a man in trouble asks.

He said: Sitti. If it all went, the shop and the flat and the car, what would I still actually have.

She did not treat it as a strange question. That is the first thing he noticed. She put her cup down and thought about it for what felt like a long time, in a room with a great deal of noise in it, and then she said:

Habibi. When we came, we brought two cases between five people, and I can tell you every single thing that was in them, and none of it is in my house now. It all went. Sold, broken, given away, lost in the second move.

And she counted on her fingers, slowly, the way she does.

The way your mother makes the rice, which is my mother's way. The prayer we say before a journey, which nobody wrote down. The thing we do when somebody is sick, where we do not ask, we simply come. Your uncle's laugh, which is my father's laugh, and he never met him. The fact that no one in this family has ever been allowed to sit alone at a table.

She said: none of that was in the cases, and all of it came.

Yusuf sat at a wedding table with his elbows on the cloth and found that he could not say anything for a moment, and he could not have explained it to any of the men he was sitting with.

And the sentence that arrived, sitting there, had nothing to do with the shop.

He thought: I have spent eleven years building something I could lose, and everything my family actually owns has already survived losing everything twice.

Let me say the word properly first

Before we go on 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 man sitting at a wedding table.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a business, not a total. 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 let me be plain about what this article refuses to do. It will not predict anything. Nothing here is a warning that the shop is at risk, and nothing here uses the fear of ruin to make a point, and an article that did would be borrowing your fear to do a job the truth can do on its own. The business is fine. Keep building it. Money is not wicked, and eleven years of six in the morning is not a spiritual problem. If you are genuinely short, that is real and deserves a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that.

What I want to do is narrower. I want to answer the question you actually asked, and I would rather the word of God answered it, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed.

An inheritance kept somewhere else

Peter writes to people who had already lost a great deal, and he does not open by promising them any of it back. He opens with where their inheritance is being kept, and the Holy Spirit has been carrying that sentence to families ever since.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you.1 Peter 1:3-4

Three words about the inheritance and then one about the location, and the location is the part that does the work.

Imperishable: it does not rot. Undefiled: nothing can spoil it. Unfading: it does not lose its color the way everything else in a house eventually does. And then, kept in heaven for you, which is to say the storage was never your responsibility and the security is not yours to arrange.

That is a completely different kind of ownership from the kind you have been practicing for eleven years, and the difference is not that one is real and the other is not. Your shop is entirely real. The difference is who is doing the keeping.

You are not a fearful man for asking the question at a wedding. You are somebody who has built something good and wanted to know what was underneath it, and the written word does not scold anybody for asking that. It answers, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the answer land in a body rather than only in an argument.

And here is what is already true of you tonight, before you know one thing about next year's trade. You are rich in the place that holds. His word says the inheritance is kept, present tense, by Somebody who is not you, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a settled fact in a man rather than a phrase in a letter.

What came in the cases and what came anyway

Think about what got you at that table. It wasn't the answer itself. You could have written most of it down.

It was your grandmother counting on her fingers, slowly, in a noisy room, and every single thing she named being something no case could hold. You were starving to hear the real account read out by somebody who had actually been through the losing, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as morbid, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a person and not merely about them.

That is the honest thing under the question. You were not afraid the shop would go. You were asking whether there was anything underneath it, and you had never heard anybody say the answer out loud with the authority of having tested it.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. Nothing that is genuinely yours is in the shop. Jesus told His friends the night before everything visibly collapsed that He was leaving them peace, which is not a thing anybody can carry out of a building, and He was at that wedding table before your grandmother put her cup down.