The Number You Inherited

Della has a figure in her head, and she has never told anybody what it is, and she was about nine years old when she set it.

She did not know she was setting it. Nobody does. What happened was a winter, and in that winter there was a conversation between her mother and father in a kitchen that she was not supposed to hear and did hear, and there was a number in it, and there was a particular quality in her mother's voice when she said it.

Della is sixty-one. She could not tell you what she had for supper on Tuesday. She could tell you that number and she could do her mother's voice.

Her own figure is not the same one. It has been adjusted over the years, obviously, for a different world and a different life, but it is not really a different figure. It is that figure with a life's worth of arithmetic done to it, and the arithmetic has never once changed what the figure is for.

What it is for is this: it is the amount at which a woman would never again have to make the sound her mother made in that kitchen.

Now, Della has been past that figure. More than once, actually. She got there in her forties and it did not register, and she got there again after the sale and she remembers noticing and feeling almost nothing at all, and she remembers being confused by the nothing and putting it down to being tired.

And then the figure went up.

She did not raise it. That is what everyone gets wrong about this. Nobody sits down and moves their own safe number, in the way that nobody decides to be thirsty. It simply is higher afterwards, in the way that the horizon is still ahead of you after a day's walking, and for exactly the same reason.

She worked this out on her own back step with a cup of coffee and no particular plan to work anything out.

She thought: this is not my number. I have been carrying my mother's fear and doing arithmetic on it for fifty years.

Now, hear the thing I want said before anything else, because there is a way to hear this that would hurt somebody and I am closing that door.

Nothing about Della's mother is being criticized here. That woman did the best she could in a winter that was not her fault, and Della loves her and would fight you about her, and the fear in that kitchen was not a failure of faith or of nerve. It was a woman doing sums at a table with nothing much to work with.

And Della is not being told she is wrong to save. She is not. Nowhere in Scripture is a careful woman rebuked for being careful, and if anybody has told you that putting something aside proves you do not trust God, they were wrong and it was not from Him.

That is not the subject.

The subject is that there is a number in your head, and you did not set it as the person you are now, and it has never once been examined by the adult who has been serving it.

You have your own version. There is a figure, and you know roughly what it is, and if you sit still for a moment you can probably find the room it was set in.

Nobody is calling you fearful. You may be the steadiest person on your road.

The number was just never yours to begin with.

The word for portion is a land word

There is a line in the Psalms that people read as poetry and that was originally a legal description.

The LORD is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup: thou maintainest my lot.Psalm 16:5

Portion and lot are the words used when the land was divided. Every family got a measured share, marked out, recorded, and it was theirs and could not be permanently sold away from them, and if it was lost it came back at the jubilee.

And one tribe got no land at all. The priests were told, plainly, that the Lord Himself was their portion, and it was not a consolation prize, it was the arrangement.

That is the sentence David is using. He is not saying God is nice. He is saying God is the recorded, measured, legally held share out of which he lives.

And hear what is already true over you. You have a portion, and it is not a figure. That is not my encouragement: the written word says the Lord is the portion of mine inheritance, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman on a back step with a cup of coffee.

And it is maintained, not defended. Thou maintainest my lot. The maintaining is His verb, not hers, and the Spirit is the one who does that keeping, which means nobody is asking a sixty-one year old woman to hold a boundary line up on her own for another twenty years.

The number is not the problem, and neither is having it

I want to be plain, because this is exactly where a message like this starts giving financial instruction from a position of total ignorance, and I am not going to do that to you.

I am not going to tell you what your figure should be. I do not know your life. I do not know who is unwell, whose care is coming, what a bad year would do in your house, and a woman who names somebody else's safe number from a distance is meddling in a thing she cannot see.

I am not going to tell you the figure is too high, and I am not going to tell you it is too low, and I am certainly not going to tell you that having one is faithless. Joseph stored grain for seven years and God is the one who told him to.

The trouble was never that Della has a number.

The trouble is that the number has a job it cannot do, and it has been failing at that job quietly for fifty years while she kept giving it a promotion.

You are not going to be held by a figure. That is not pessimism: the word says riches make themselves wings and fly away, and it is not said with any contempt, it is said the way you would warn somebody about a rope that will not take their weight, and the Spirit is the one who makes that land without fear attached.

And you have already been kept. Through every year that number was too low, through the winter it was set in, through all of it. He kept you, says the word, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit that the keeping was never once dependent on the figure being reached.