The Ring in the Dish by the Sink

There is a small white dish on the windowsill over the kitchen sink, the kind a man drops screws into when he is taking a door off its hinges.

His wedding ring has been in it for nine days.

He knows it is nine because he counted this morning on his fingers while the coffee ran through, and then he stood there a second longer, annoyed with himself for counting.

He is in the hallway now with a mug he has not drunk from. It is a good hallway. He hung the coat hooks himself, into the studs, level, in the second year. Six hooks. There are three coats on it and the far three hooks are bare, and the light coming down the hall in the afternoon lands on the bare ones because that is the side the window is on. He has thought about pulling the whole rail down. He has thought about that four times this week.

On the hall table there is a mortgage statement with two names printed on it in the same font, and a card from an aunt, and a set of keys that are still his keys, to a house that is still his address, on a street where every single person knows by now.

That is the part that gets him. Nothing has changed on paper yet. The paper is going to take months. Somewhere there is a filing cabinet where he and his life are exactly as they were.

He stands in the hall a while. Not doing anything. A man in his own house at four in the afternoon with a cold mug, looking at three empty hooks.

Then the furnace cycles and he goes back to the kitchen and does not look at the dish on the windowsill, and does not move it either, and this is now the ninth day of that.

That is you.

Maybe it is not a ring. Maybe it is a lanyard from a job on the hook by the door, or a spare room that is a spare room again, or a chair at your table that everybody now walks around. Maybe it has been nine days and maybe it has been thirty. But you are standing in a hallway that used to be one thing and is currently half of it, holding something you cannot drink.

Two things, before we go any further.

Your ground genuinely moved. I am not going to reduce that. Not with perspective, not with somebody down the road who has it worse, not with a verse used like a lid.

And I am not going to explain it to you. I do not know why this happened, and every man who has stood in your hall this week and offered you a reason was guessing. Some of them were guessing kindly. It was still guessing.

The tribe that came out of the survey with nothing

There is a psalm that gets quoted at people in your position, and it is usually quoted badly, so let me open it properly.

The LORD is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup: thou maintainest my lot. The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage.Psalm 16:5 to 6

Every word in that is surveying language. Portion, lot, lines, heritage. The lines are the measuring cords a surveyor drags across ground to cut a parcel out of it. When Israel came into the land they ran those cords over the whole country and divided it by tribe, and every tribe walked away with a parcel and a boundary and a name on it.

Except one.

The Levites came out of that survey with nothing on the map. No parcel. No fence line. And the reason given is not that they had been overlooked, and it is not that a smaller lot was all they could be trusted with. The reason given is this: the Lord Himself is their inheritance.

That is the sentence David is reaching for. He is not standing in a good house counting his furniture. You have a portion that was never drawn on the plat and never went through anybody's settlement. Psalm 16:5 makes the Lord the parcel rather than the owner of one, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a man able to feel the weight of that on a bad afternoon instead of reading it as a slogan.

Look at what that does to the arithmetic. If your portion is a plot of land, a survey can move the line. If your portion is a Person, there is no line to move. You have not lost the thing that was actually holding you up. That is what is written over the tribe with no map, and the Spirit of God is the one who presses it down into a man standing in his own hallway rather than a man leaving a good church service.

What I am not going to do to you

I am not going to make you count.

You know the conversation. Somebody sits you down and starts an inventory. You still have your health. You still have the kids. You still have your job. And every item on that list may be true and the whole exercise is still an insult, because a man does not need a tally, he needs ground.

An audit is not comfort. An audit is a stranger deciding on your behalf which losses were the important ones.

So no list. And no rushing you past the hooks either. Three of them are empty and they are going to be empty tomorrow, and nobody who loves you should be asking you to be finished with that by the weekend.

You are not being asked to hurry, and nothing in what God has written puts you on a schedule. Psalm 16 has David naming his portion in the same breath as naming his trouble, with no gap between the two, and the Holy Spirit is patient in a way that people who love you and cannot bear your face sometimes are not.

Here is the one thing I will say about what is still standing, and then I will stop. It is not a longer list. It is a shorter one. You have a portion that did not go out the door with anything that went out the door. The written word calls Him the portion of a man's cup and says God Himself maintains the lot, and it is the Spirit of God holding that in place today, not the state of your marriage and not the state of your nerve.