The Lines That Fell to Me

She got home at twenty past eleven and stood in her own kitchen with her coat still on for longer than she meant to.

The evening had been lovely. That is worth establishing first, because the alternative reading is available and it is wrong. Nobody showed off. Her friend cooked something good and was funny about how it had nearly gone wrong. There were nine people and the conversation was the kind that runs on its own without anybody steering it. She was glad she went.

But the house is larger and the kitchen is the room the house is built around, and there were nine people in it and a table that takes nine, and somebody's daughter came in at half past nine to get something and stayed forty minutes because that is a house where people stay.

And she stood in her own kitchen at twenty past eleven, which is a good kitchen, in a house she likes, in a life she chose most of, and it did not feel like it had felt at seven o'clock that evening.

Nothing had changed in it. That is the thing she noted at the time and could not do anything with. Not one object in that room was different. The room was worth exactly what it was worth at seven, and it had lost something anyway, somewhere between the front door and the light switch.

She did sums. Everybody does. Rooms, people at the table on an ordinary Tuesday, how many stay when they come in. She did them for about eight minutes and then made herself stop and went up, and the sums were still running faintly while she brushed her teeth.

The hardest part is that she does not want the other house. Tested honestly, and she has tested it, she does not want it. Which means the sums are not about wanting. They are about worth, and the arithmetic has been running in a currency she cannot name.

You will have your own twenty past eleven. The moment your own life is briefly reappraised, downward, on the basis of nothing.

The line about lines

There is a sentence in a psalm that uses a technical term from land surveying and is the more beautiful for it.

The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.Psalm 16:6

The lines are measuring cords. When land was divided in Israel, a cord was used to mark the boundaries of a portion, and the phrase the lines have fallen is the language of that division: the portion was assigned, by lot, and the man speaking did not choose it and did not compete for it.

So the first thing to notice is that he is not congratulating himself on his holdings. He is describing something that was handed to him. The pleasantness of the place is not evidence of his judgment, which is the whole reason he can say it out loud without it being a boast, and it is also why nobody in that world would have thought to compare portions and grade the recipients: a lot is not a performance.

And the second thing is the tense. Have fallen. It is done. The portion is not being adjusted in the light of what the neighbor's turns out to be, which is exactly what happens to a person in a kitchen at twenty past eleven.

So take it plainly: you are standing inside a portion that was assigned rather than won, and that is what Psalm 16 says in its own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a surveyor's phrase and lays it down in a kitchen where a woman is still wearing her coat.

Which reaches the actual problem, which is not envy. She does not want the other house. The trouble is that her own portion was reappraised on the basis of a comparison, and the reappraisal happened without her consent and without any information being added. Nothing came into that kitchen at twenty past eleven except a memory of a different room.

The psalm does not tell her to think positively about her kitchen. It says something better, which is that the lines fell. You have been given something rather than left with it, and the written word is what makes that distinction rather than my saying so, and His Spirit is the one who moves it from an idea into a body standing on a floor.

And notice he calls it a beautiful inheritance, which is the second land word in the same verse. An inheritance is not a wage and it is not a prize, and it does not rise or fall based on what somebody else inherited. You are holding something whose value nobody else's evening can move, and Scripture is what settles that, and His Spirit is what keeps it settled past the light switch.

Nobody's house is ahead

Now the guardrail, and this one has a particular trap in it.

Her friend's house is not a problem to be reframed. It is a good house full of people, and the daughter who came in and stayed forty minutes did so because it is that kind of home, and that is a real and lovely thing and it should not be quietly downgraded here to make somebody feel better.

And the smaller kitchen is not the more faithful one. That sentence is not available. There is no arrangement in which a quieter life is the deeper life, and if this article leaves anybody feeling that a small table is spiritually superior to a large one, then it has produced the same sums in the opposite direction.

So: you have nothing to win in that kitchen and nothing that anybody took, because a crown in Scripture is placed on a head and never earned, and His Spirit is what makes that a floor rather than a phrase.

Which leaves the eight minutes of sums as what they actually were, which is not a sin to be repented of and not a character flaw to be worked on. They were a machine running on no fuel and producing a reading anyway, in a woman who had just had a good evening with people she loves. Treating that as a moral event would add a second weight to a night that already had one too many. You have been running an instrument rather than committing an offense, and the written word is what makes that distinction rather than my leniency, and His Spirit is the one who lets a person put a thing down without first having to be forgiven for having picked it up.