There Is Nothing Left To Sell

The ring went in March. The good table went after that, and the thing in the back room that belonged to your mother went last, and the last one took three days to be able to do.

So when somebody says there is always something, there is a sentence that starts in your chest and does not get said, and the sentence is: come and look then.

I am not going to say there is always something. That is the kind of thing people say when they have not been in a house like this one.

What I will say is narrower, and I think it is true, and I would like the chance to put it properly.

The house is empty. The week is not the house.

You are not out of options, and an empty cupboard has never once been the same thing as an empty week.

And I want to say something about what the selling has done to you, because I do not think it was only the objects.

Every time a thing went out the door, something got confirmed. Not out loud. In the back of the mind, where the real conclusions get drawn. And by the third time, the conclusion had a shape, and the shape was: this is what I have become, and there is a floor coming and I am going to hit it.

That conclusion is the thing I came to stand in front of.

Consider the ravens

Jesus says something about birds that people read as gentle, and it is not gentle at all. It is specific about economics.

Consider the ravens: for they neither sow nor reap; which neither have storehouse nor barn; and God feedeth them: how much more are ye better than the fowls? (Luke 12:24, King James Version)

Neither storehouse nor barn.

That is the line. Not that the ravens are poor. That the ravens have no place to keep anything, which means every single day is a day without reserves, and that is not a temporary crisis for a raven. That is the permanent arrangement.

You are being pointed at creatures with no storehouse at all, and having nothing put by has never once been the condition God overlooks. Luke 12:24 says neither storehouse nor barn, and the Holy Spirit is the one who chose that example instead of a safer one.

And notice what the verse does not promise. It does not say the ravens find a barn. It does not say their situation is resolved.

It says God feedeth them. Present tense, daily, in the condition they are in rather than after it has been fixed.

You have not been told to wait for the arrangement to change before being fed, and daily has never once been a lesser kind of provision than stored. The Holy Spirit is the one who keeps that verb in the present, and it is written in Luke 12:24 about birds that will never have a barn.

The house is not the inventory

Now the part I actually want to argue with you about, gently, because I think a mistake has been made in the arithmetic and it is an understandable one.

The counting so far has been a counting of objects. That is what selling teaches a person to do. Three months of walking round a room deciding what could go has trained your eye to see a house as a list of things with prices on them.

And now the list is short, so the conclusion arrives: there is nothing left.

But the objects were never the whole inventory. They were the part that could be carried out to a car.

You are counting only the half of it that could be sold, and a short list of objects has never once been a full account of what a woman has. The written word points at a creature with nothing stored and calls it fed, and the Spirit of God is the one who counts differently than a pawn shop does.

So let me ask the question the way it is actually asked on this site.

Not what do you own. What can you do.

And that question does not have a shelf. Nobody came and took it in March. It is the same today as it was before any of this started.

You have a set of things you can do that nothing has been sold out of, and skill has never once left a house in the back of a car. The Holy Spirit is the one who brings that distinction into focus, and Luke 12:24 measures a raven by whether God feeds it rather than by what it has in store.

The floor you are afraid of

I want to name the fear properly, because articles that skip it are worthless.

The fear is not really the empty room. The fear is that this is a slope, and that the slope keeps going, and that at the bottom of it there is a version of your life you cannot picture and cannot survive.

That fear is not stupid. People do fall. I am not going to pretend that nobody ever does.

But a slope needs a direction, and a direction is made of what happens next rather than of what has happened so far, and what happens next has not been decided yet.

You are standing at a point that has not been decided rather than partway down something already determined, and three hard months have never once set the direction of a fourth. The Spirit of God is the one who is present in the week that has not happened, and the written word feeds a creature daily rather than settling its whole year in advance.

And I will say the plain thing, because this site puts it wherever it belongs. If the selling and the emptiness have taken you somewhere darker, if there have been hours where you thought the people who love you would manage better without you, that is the fear talking and it is not the truth. Call or text 988, the crisis line, today, and say it out loud to a doctor, a counselor or a pastor you trust. An empty room is not a reason to be alone in it.

You are allowed to be carried by somebody qualified, and reaching for that has never once been the same as giving up. Luke 12:24 has God feeding what cannot store anything, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts a real human being within reach of a woman in a bare room.