Where The Lines Fell

The same road, every evening, for eleven years.

Out of the gate, left at the postbox, along the back of the playing fields where the hedge has a gap in it that everyone uses, and up the rise. It takes twenty-six minutes. He has never once timed it and he knows exactly how long it takes.

Lately he has started doing something on that walk that he does not enjoy and cannot seem to stop.

He counts.

Not on purpose. It starts around the postbox. What has gone this year, what has not come back, what is smaller than it was, what other people appear to have, what he assumed by now would be settled and is not. By the gap in the hedge it has usually got as far as the sentence, which he does not say out loud but which sits there fully formed: I do not actually know what I have got.

And that sentence is not really about arithmetic, though it arrived dressed as arithmetic. It is a man of fifty-three on a rise at the back of a playing field wanting somebody to tell him plainly what is actually his.

So let me say the plain thing first, before anything else, because this whole site is named after a promise and I am not going to trade on it for three paragraphs before admitting what I mean.

Wealth here means your portion. It does not mean your balance. Nothing in this message is going to increase the number in an account, and nothing here is going to suggest that God moves money in response to anything you say or do. If you came for that, I would rather disappoint you in the first minute than in the last one.

What I have is an inventory. A real one, of what is actually yours, and it is the oldest one there is.

Somebody else is holding the lot

Here is the psalm, and I am going to be careful with it, because it says the thing better than any explanation of it ever could and my job is mostly to get out of its way.

The LORD is my chosen portion and my cup; you hold my lot. The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.Psalm 16:5 to 6

Four things in two lines, and every one of them is an item on the list you have been trying to make on that walk. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land in a person rather than merely read true.

First: my portion. That word comes out of a world where land was divided by family, and your portion was the piece that was yours, the ground you stood on and worked and were buried in. It was not what you earned. It was what you were allotted, and it made you a person with a place rather than a person passing through. 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.

And the psalm does something startling with it. It does not say my portion is a field. It says the LORD is my portion. The One doing the allotting is the allotment.

Second: my cup. Which is the day. The measure of what is poured out for a person, the amount that is in front of you now. Not the estate, not the future, the cup in your two hands this evening.

Third, and this is the one I want to leave in your chest: you hold my lot.

Not I hold it. Not I secure it, protect it, grow it, defend it against a bad year. You hold my lot. It is in somebody else's hand, and that hand does not shake, and the reason the man writing this can walk up a rise without counting is not that he has more than you. It is that he is not the one holding it.

Fourth: the lines have fallen for me in pleasant places. A surveyor's cord, laid on ground, marking out what is yours. Fallen, past tense, finished. Somebody has already been out with the measure and the boundary is set.

Now let me name the pit, because it is not really about money and you know that better than I do.

The exhausting thing about the counting is that it never finishes. There is no total at the end of it, because the moment you land on one, something moves. So every evening the ledger opens again at the postbox, and the reason it opens is not greed. It is that you are trying to establish whether you are secure, and you have been trying to establish it from a column of figures, and figures cannot answer that question. They were never able to. That is not a failure of your faith or your arithmetic. It is a category error, and almost everybody makes it. That is not my opinion. It is what the word says, and His Spirit is the one who carries it.

And hear this too, because I do not want to leave a false impression. Real lack is real. If your year has genuinely taken things from you, that loss is not imaginary and it is not unspiritual to feel it, and God is not asking you to pretend the road is easier than it is. Wanting relief is not a fault. Nothing in this message asks you to want less.

What it says is that underneath whatever the year did, there is a boundary line that the year did not move, and a hand holding a lot that no season has been able to prise open.