The Day You Passed It

Nadim named the figure when he was twenty-five, out loud, to a friend, in a café with the chairs still stacked at the back.

He was not showing off. It was one of those conversations young men have where they say a true thing by accident, and what he said was that if he ever had that much he would stop being afraid.

He passed it when he was forty.

And nothing happened.

That is the whole of the strange part. He remembers the week. There was no ceremony, obviously, and he had not expected one, but he had expected something, and what he got was an ordinary Wednesday in which he noticed the thing, thought about the café for a moment, and then went and dealt with something at work that was mildly annoying.

He waited a while after that, half expecting it to arrive late, the way relief sometimes does.

It did not arrive late. And then, without any decision at all, without ever sitting down and revising anything, he began to notice that the figure in his head was no longer that figure. It was a bigger one. He could not tell you when it changed and he certainly never changed it.

He is fifty-two now. He has passed the second one too.

And here is the sentence Nadim used, sitting in a courtyard with his sleeves rolled, and it is the best description of this I have ever heard from anybody. He said: I have arrived twice and I have never once been there.

Now, I want to be careful, because there is a way to preach this that is contemptuous of a man's whole working life, and I am not going to do that.

Nadim's twenty-seven years were not wasted. He built something. There are people who work for him whose houses are standing because of decisions he made carefully at times when it would have been easier not to. That is real, and God saw all of it, and none of it is being taken back in this message.

And nothing here is going to tell you that having reached a figure is a spiritual problem, or that a smaller life would have been holier. That is the same error stood on its head and it does just as much harm. A man with plenty is not further from God than a man with little, and choosing less on purpose still leaves the amount in the middle of the room where it does not belong.

The point is not the amount. The point is the nothing.

You have your own version. There was a line, and you crossed it, and you can probably remember the week, and what you felt was not what the twenty-five year old in the café expected.

Nobody is calling you ungrateful. You are probably more grateful than most.

You simply arrived, and it turned out not to be a place.

The oldest observation about this is not a rebuke

There is a line in Ecclesiastes that reads like a warning and is actually a piece of reporting.

He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth abundance with increase: this is also vanity.Ecclesiastes 5:10

Notice that it is not a command. He does not say do not love silver. He says what happens, in the flat voice of a man who has watched a great many people do a thing and is telling you how it turns out.

Shall not be satisfied. Not should not be. It is a description of a mechanism, and mechanisms are not moral failings; they are simply how a thing works.

And the second clause is the one that explains Nadim's Wednesday. Nor he that loveth abundance with increase. The increase is real. It arrives. It just does not do the thing it was expected to do, because satisfaction was never in it, in the same way that no amount of salt water has ever helped anybody who was thirsty.

And now hear what is already true over you. You are not broken because the crossing did not settle you. That is not my kindness: the written word says plainly that it does not satisfy, so what you felt on that Wednesday was accurate rather than ungrateful, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man in a courtyard with his sleeves rolled.

And you already have a portion. Not once the figure holds: the word says the Lord is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup, and portion there is a land word, a measured recorded share, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a felt possession rather than a line of poetry.

Nobody is coming for the figure

Now I want to be very plain, because this is where a message like this starts giving instructions about somebody's money, and I am not competent to do that and would not do it if I were.

I am not going to tell you what your figure should be. I do not know your life, your household, who depends on you, what is coming. Nobody who has never met you should be naming a number for your family, and I am not going to be the first.

I am not going to tell you it is too high, and I am not going to tell you to stop saving. Joseph stored grain for seven years on instruction from God Himself, and a man who provides for his own is commended and not scolded in the New Testament, in as many words.

The figure is not the problem.

The problem is only that it was given a job it cannot do, and it has been quietly failing at that job for twenty-seven years while being promoted every time it failed.

And the settling you were after has never once been for sale. That is not a sad sentence. The word says peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you, and give is the verb, and the Spirit is the one described as bringing it, so it has never been on any figure's payroll and never could have been.

You are already kept. Through the years before the first line and every year since, He kept you. The word says He is able to keep you from falling, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit that this keeping never once depended on where the figure stood.