What He Asked Me at the Table

Emmett's boy asked him at supper on a Tuesday, out of nowhere, the way they do, with a fork in his hand and no idea what he was starting.

He is fourteen. They had been talking about a fellow up the road who had died, and about the auction that was coming, and the boy chewed for a while and then said: Dad, what would you leave me?

And Emmett answered him straight away, which is the part he keeps going back over.

He said: the place, if we hold it. The equipment, most of it. Your grandmother's ring is for whoever gets married first, and there is a little put by, and the truck will be no good to anybody by then.

The boy said okay and asked whether there was more bread.

And Emmett sat there and heard his own answer coming back to him for the rest of the meal and most of the night. Because he had been asked a question by his own son, and he had answered it with an auction list, and he had done it fast, without a second of thinking, which is how a man finds out what is actually in the front of his mind.

He is not in trouble. He wants that clear. The place is holding, this is the third decent year in a row, and there is nothing coming.

What got him was two days later. The boy was helping him with a gate and doing it badly, and Emmett showed him again, and the boy said, not looking up: Grandad taught you this one, didn't he. You do it his way. You do the thing with your thumb.

You do the thing with your thumb.

Emmett stood at a gatepost with a wrench in his hand and had to look off across the field for a bit, and he could not have told a soul in that county what was going on with him.

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

He thought: I told that boy what he would get, and he has already got the thing I actually meant to give him, and neither of us knew until just now.

Let me 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 acreage, not what goes on an auction bill. A portion is the old table word for what gets set down in front of a man because he belongs 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. There is no warning here that the place is about to go, and nothing here uses the fear of losing it to make a point, because leaning on a man's fear to teach him something true is a cheap way to do an honest job. The ground is fine. Keep farming it. Money is not wicked and holding onto a place through three good years 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 look at is the answer you gave at the table, and I would rather the word of God did the looking, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed.

Two accounts, running at the same time

Paul writes four lines about this that are the plainest thing in any of his letters, and the Holy Spirit has been carrying them to men at gateposts ever since.

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.2 Corinthians 4:16-18

Read the middle of it. Two things are happening at the same time in the same man. One is being spent and the other is being built, day by day, on the same days.

That is not a comfort about the far future. It is a description of what is going on in a man at a gatepost on an ordinary Thursday. Something in him is wearing, and he can feel it in his knees, and something else in him is being added to, and there is no receipt for it anywhere.

You are not a shallow man for the answer you gave. You are somebody who was asked a question about inheritance and reached, in half a second, for the account that gets written down, because that is the account everybody has always written down. The written word does not scold anybody for that, and it is the Holy Spirit who turns a fast answer into a question a man can actually go back and answer properly.

And here is what is already true of you tonight, before anybody knows a thing about next year. You are rich in the place that holds. His word says the unseen things are the eternal ones, present tense, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a settled fact in a man rather than a nice idea he agrees with.

What the boy already has

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

It was: you do the thing with your thumb. It was a fourteen year old telling you, without knowing it, that a dead man's hands are still working in the family, and that they got there without a single item changing owners. You were starving to know that something had actually gone across, 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 man and not merely about him.

That is the honest thing under the answer you gave. It was not greed and it was not shallowness. It was that nobody has ever handed you the language for the other account, so when your own son asked you for it, you gave him the only inventory you have ever seen written down.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. The real transfer has been going on since he was small and none of it required a will. Jesus spent three years with twelve men and left them no property whatsoever, and what He handed over is still going, and He was at that gatepost before the boy spoke.