What Have You Actually Got

Ines was asked it over coffee by somebody who meant nothing by it at all, and she has been carrying the answer she gave for three weeks.

The friend is not a deep person and this was not a deep conversation. They were talking about somebody else's news, and about how everybody they know seems to be either buying something or leaving something, and at some point the friend put her cup down and said, cheerfully, not looking for anything: so what have you actually got at the minute?

And Ines answered.

She said she was working toward the thing at work that would be settled by spring. She said the flat was fine for now until the lease came up and then she would see. She said she was building up the thing she does on the side and there was a conversation happening that might come to something in the autumn.

Three sentences and every single one of them was in the future.

The friend said something warm and they moved on and it was, genuinely, nothing.

And Ines walked to the bus afterward and found she was doing an inventory in her head, and found that she could not get it to produce anything. Every time she reached for something she had, her mind handed her the version of it that was not finished yet, the way a person hands you the wrong end of something.

What got her was three weeks later at her sister's, on a Sunday, when her niece, who is four, was made to say what she was thankful for and said, with absolute confidence and no hesitation at all: this dinner, and my cup, and everybody's here.

This dinner, and my cup, and everybody's here.

Ines sat at her sister's table and had to look down at her plate for a second, and she could not have explained it to a single person in that room.

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

She thought: a four year old can produce a complete inventory in six words and it is all in the present tense, and I have not been able to name one thing I have since I was about twenty-six.

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 with you than clever.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a lease, not what will be settled by spring. 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 is the article where that stops being a definition and becomes a list.

And let me be plain about the money before we go further. Nothing here says it is wrong to be working toward things, or that a person should stop planning, or that the conversation in the autumn does not matter. It does matter. Plan away. 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 much narrower. I want you to be able to answer the question, and I would rather the word of God answered it, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed at what is on your list.

A man writes down what he has, in the present tense

The sixteenth psalm is where this whole site ends up, and the sixth verse is a completed inventory in one line, and the Holy Spirit has been carrying it to people who cannot answer that question ever since.

The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.Psalm 16:6

I am not going to improve on that. It does not need help and anything I add would be smaller than it is.

But look at the tense, because that is the part your bus journey needed. Have fallen. Not will fall. The measuring is finished. In that culture a man's portion of land was marked out with a measuring line, and the phrase means the surveying is done, the pegs are in, and the boundaries are where they are.

And then the second half, which is not modest and was never meant to be: I have a beautiful inheritance. Present tense, first person, no qualification, no reference at all to anything arriving later.

You are not a person with nothing. You are somebody who has been trained, by an entirely ordinary decade, to hand people the unfinished version of everything, and the written word does not scold anybody for that. It puts a finished sentence in a person's mouth, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between reading that line and being able to say it about your own life.

And here is what is true of you tonight, before the lease and the spring and the autumn resolve into anything. You have a portion and it is not pending. His word says the lines have fallen and the inheritance is beautiful, in the present tense, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a settled fact in a body rather than a verse people put on cards.

What is actually on the list

Think about what got you at that table. It wasn't the sweetness. Four year olds are sweet constantly and it does not undo anybody.

It was: this dinner, and my cup, and everybody's here. It was a complete inventory, produced instantly, with no future tense in it anywhere, by somebody who has never once been asked what she is working toward. You were starving to be able to answer in that tense, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as ingratitude, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a person and not merely about them.

That is the honest thing under the three weeks. It is not that your life is thin. It is that you have lost the ability to describe it in the tense it is actually happening in, and no lease renewal and no spring will give that back, because the problem was never in the assets.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. The surveying is done and you are standing inside the boundary. Jesus told people not to worry about tomorrow and then handed them a today, plainly, as a thing they had, and He was at that table before your niece was asked anything.