Whose I Am

Ari had been asking the same question for about two years, in a fairly organized way, and had begun to suspect he was being deliberately misunderstood.

The question is: what do I actually have.

He did not arrive at it in a crisis. It arrived in the ordinary way, in his forties, in a life that is going well by any measure anybody would use. There is work and there is a family and there is a house and there is a synagogue-shaped hole in his week that he filled a few years ago with something that has turned out to be the most important thing in his life.

And the question sat there, and he took it seriously, because he takes things seriously.

He read. That is what he does. He read Psalm 16 and got the portion and the cup, and thought: yes, but what is it. He read Lamentations and got the LORD is my portion, and thought: yes, but what does that consist of. He read the passages about the priests having no inheritance and thought: this is the same answer again in different clothes.

Two years of asking what, and getting, in every single place he looked, an answer that named a Person.

He had begun to feel, and he would only say this to somebody he trusted, that Scripture was refusing to give him the list.

What got him was his own daughter, who is eight, being asked at a table by a visiting relative what she had got for her birthday. And she said three things, and then she said, without being asked anything else: and my abba made the cake, he always does, that is our thing.

That is our thing.

Ari sat at his own table and did not say anything for a moment, and he 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 birthday.

He thought: she was asked what and she answered what twice and then whose, without noticing the change, and she was not confused, and she is the only person at this table who is not confused.

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 than clever with a man who has been asking one question for two years.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a total, not a list. 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 last article on this site and the place where that has to stop being a definition and become the answer.

And let me be plain about the question itself, because it deserves respect. It is a good question. It is not materialism and it is not a failure to be spiritual, and a man in his forties asking what do I actually have is doing something serious that most people never do. If you are genuinely short as well, 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 show you why the answer keeps arriving in that shape, and I would rather the word of God did the showing, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed at it.

The one place where the portion runs the other way

In the song Moses sings near the end of his life, there is a line where the whole vocabulary of portion and inheritance turns around and faces the other direction.

But the LORD's portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage.Deuteronomy 32:9

I am not going to improve on that, and the Holy Spirit has been keeping it for people who kept asking what.

Everywhere else, the portion is what a person has. Here, the portion is what God has, and it is people, and the word for allotted heritage is the same land-surveying vocabulary that runs through the whole of the rest of it. The lines, the measuring, the lot.

He has been measured out a portion and it is a people, and one of them is you.

Which explains the two years. You have been asking what do I have, and every time you ask it Scripture answers with a Person, and you have taken that as an evasion. It is not an evasion. It is the only kind of answer available in a relationship where the counting runs both ways, and this verse is the proof, because here it is God's turn to be asked what He has, and He answers the same way you keep being answered.

You are not a materialist for wanting a list. You are somebody asking a real question in the only vocabulary anybody ever taught you, and the written word does not scold anybody for that. It turns the vocabulary around once, in one line, so that the shape of every other answer becomes visible, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between reading that and stopping asking.

And here is what is true of you tonight, before you write anything down. You have a portion and you are one. His word says the LORD's portion is his people, present tense, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a settled fact in a man rather than a striking verse in an old song.

Why the answer kept changing the question

Think about what got you at that table. It wasn't the sweetness. Your daughter is eight and sweet constantly.

It was: and my abba made the cake, he always does, that is our thing. It was a child asked a what question, answering it correctly twice, and then moving into whose without noticing that she had changed anything, because to her it is one list. You were starving to see somebody hold both without effort, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as confusion, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a man and not merely about him.

That is the honest thing under the two years. It is not that you have been asking the wrong question. It is that you have been asking it in a vocabulary with one column, and the answer keeps arriving in two, and you have been reading the second column as a refusal to fill in the first.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. You are somebody's portion and that is not a smaller fact than any list. Jesus prayed out loud, the night before He died, about the people the Father had given Him, which is a man saying what he has and naming people, and He was at that table when the cake was mentioned.