They Ask Me Every Thanksgiving

It is always your uncle and it is always somewhere around the second plate.

He is not unkind. I want to say that early because I know he is not, and because the fact that he is not is most of what makes this hard to explain to anybody.

He asks how the house hunting is going.

That is it. That is the whole thing. Seven words, delivered warmly, with a fork in his hand, in a room where everybody is talking about something else.

And you have an answer. You have several. You have the light one, and the one about the market, and the one where you turn it round and ask about his roof, which worked once and has not worked since.

And every year you drive home and think about it for most of the way, and every year, somewhere around the second week of November, you notice that you have started to think about it in advance.

That is what I want to look at. Not the question. The three weeks before it.

The three weeks are the cost

Let me put the arithmetic where you can see it, because the question itself is about four seconds long.

Four seconds at the table. And somewhere between two and three weeks beforehand of a low background hum in which you rehearse, and reject, and rehearse again, and think about what you will say and how you will look when you say it.

That is about twenty thousand times more of your life spent on it than the asking takes.

You have been paying three weeks for four seconds, and a question at a table has never once been worth the month you have been giving it. The Holy Spirit is the one who was in the car with you on the drive home last year, and it is written in Psalm 16 that the lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places.

And here is why it takes three weeks, which is the part worth understanding.

It is not an answer being prepared. It is a case.

Because somewhere in you the question has stopped being a question and has become a review, and a review needs evidence, and evidence takes preparation. So every year you assemble a small defense of your entire adult life and carry it to a table where nobody is actually convening a hearing.

You have been carrying a defense to a dinner, and one warm question from an uncle has never once opened a case against you. Psalm 16 has a man looking at what he was given and calling the boundaries pleasant, and the Spirit of God is the one who put the assessment in his own mouth rather than in the room's.

The lines are fallen unto me

Here is the verse, and the image behind it is worth having.

The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage. (Psalm 16:6, King James Version)

The lines are the measuring cords. When land was divided, a cord was used to mark out a portion, and where your lines fell was where your piece was.

So the man in the psalm is looking at his allocation, the actual boundaries of his actual life, and saying: this is a good one.

You have an allocation that is yours to look at, and the ground under a person's feet has never once been something they needed a second opinion about. Psalm 16 has a man calling his own boundaries pleasant in the first person, and the Holy Spirit is the one who kept it in his own mouth.

And notice that he says it about the portion rather than about the size of it. There is nothing in that verse comparing his lot to anybody else's. It is not a man who got the biggest field saying so. It is a man looking at the ground he is actually standing on and calling it pleasant.

You are permitted to look at your own portion and call it good, and that assessment has never once needed a second opinion from anybody at that table. The Holy Spirit is the one who preserved it in the first person, and the written word puts the judgment in the man's own mouth about his own lot.

And there is something in the word fallen that I do not want to hurry past.

The lines fell. He did not draw them. There is an acknowledgement in that word of everything he did not control about where he ended up, and he is not pretending otherwise, and he still calls the result pleasant.

That is not the same as being pleased with everything. It is a man refusing to rate his life by how the lines were drawn.

You are not required to have chosen everything in order to be glad about it, and a portion you did not draw has never once been a portion you have to apologize for. Psalm 16 uses the word fallen and calls the place pleasant in the same breath, and the Spirit of God is the one who held both of those together.