I Only Have Two Things Of Hers

You have two things and you know exactly what they are.

One is small enough to fit in a hand. The other one you did not choose and it ended up with you almost by accident, and you would not have picked it if anybody had asked, and it is now one of two.

That is the whole of it. Two objects.

Other people have houses full. That is the thing that sits underneath this and does not get said, because saying it out loud sounds like a competition and grief is not supposed to be one.

But there are people who got the furniture and the boxes and the dishes and the photograph albums, and you got two things, and the arithmetic of that is a specific and lonely piece of pain that almost nobody talks about.

I want to say something before anything else, because the whole of this piece rests on it.

The amount you have is not a measure of what you had.

That is worth reading twice. What ended up in your hands was decided by logistics, by other people, by distance, by who was in the room and who was not and what the arrangements happened to be. It was not decided by how much she was yours or you were hers.

And two things is not too few, and I am going to show you why from a verse rather than from encouragement.

A handful of meal and a little oil

There is a woman in Kings who counts what she has left and the count is devastating.

And she said, As the LORD thy God liveth, I have not a cake, but an handful of meal in a barrel, and a little oil in a cruse: and, behold, I am gathering two sticks, that I may go in and dress it for me and my son, that we may eat it, and die. (1 Kings 17:12, King James Version)

A handful of meal. A little oil. Two sticks.

You are counting what is left the way Scripture records somebody counting, and a small count has never once been evidence of a small thing. 1 Kings 17:12 has a woman name two ingredients and two sticks, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says so to a young woman with two objects.

Now notice what the passage does with that count.

It does not correct her. Nobody tells her she has more than she thinks. Elijah does not say she is being dramatic or that she should be grateful for the handful. The count is accurate and it is allowed to stand as accurate.

And then the story happens anyway, out of exactly that handful and no more.

You have an accurate count that Scripture never once argues with, and a true accounting of a small amount has never once had to be talked out of anybody. The Spirit of God is the one who leaves a woman's count standing and works from it, and it is written in 1 Kings 17:12 that she had a handful and a little and two sticks.

What two things can carry

Now the practical part, and it is about how objects actually work.

An object does not hold a proportion of a person. That is the mistake in the arithmetic, and it is worth taking apart carefully.

If a house full of things held a whole person and two things held two things' worth, then the people with the furniture would have more of her than you do. And anybody who has been in both positions will tell you it does not work like that at all.

An object is a door. It is not a container holding a percentage. And a door does not become less of a door because there is only one of them in the building.

You are holding two doors rather than a small fraction of somebody, and an object has never once carried a percentage of a person. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present at one object as fully as at forty, and 1 Kings 17:12 has a whole story come out of a handful.

And here is the second thing, and this is the part that has been costing you.

Two objects are easier to keep than four hundred.

That sounds like the wrong kind of comfort and it is not. The people with the houses full have a job in front of them, and it is a hard one, and a great deal of what they are carrying is decisions rather than her. What has to be kept and what cannot be and who wants what and when.

You have two things and no decisions. That is not a smaller inheritance. It is a different shape of one, and it is the shape that can sit on a windowsill for the whole of your life without ever asking anything of you.

You are holding something that will never once ask you for a decision, and two objects have never once been a heavier or a lesser inheritance than a house. The Spirit of God is the one present in what a person can actually carry, and it is written in 1 Kings 17:12 that the count was small and true and enough for everything that followed.

And this, plainly, in these words. Two things is not a report on you. Not on how much she loved you, not on where you came in the family, not on whether you mattered. What ended up in a young woman's hands is not a verdict on the young woman, and I am not going to allow it to be read that way.

You are a woman whose place with her was settled a long way from an inventory, and how much of somebody's property came to you has never once been a measure of anything. 1 Kings 17:12 leaves a small count standing without correction in 1 Kings 17, and the same Spirit who inspired that line is in the room with you.

Both of them, together

So here is the assignment, and the word both is doing the work.

Take both of her things out and put them together where you will see them every morning.

Both. Not one on display and one in a drawer, which may be the current arrangement and is the arrangement of somebody who is rationing.

Together, side by side, on one surface, with a little space between them.

You are putting the whole of what you have in one place, and two objects together have never once looked smaller than two objects apart. The Holy Spirit is the one at work when a person stops rationing what she has, and 1 Kings 17:12 has a woman name the whole of what was in the house out loud.

And then the placement, and it is the same placement this site keeps coming back to for a reason.

Where your eyes go in the morning. The windowsill, the shelf by the door, the top of whatever is nearest the bed. Somewhere the ordinary run of your day already passes.

Because the point is not to visit them. The point is that they become part of a Tuesday, and that she becomes ordinary again rather than an occasion, and ordinary is what you have lost and it is the thing that can come back.

You are letting her be part of an ordinary morning, and a person who is present on a Tuesday has never once been honored less than one who is visited. The Spirit of God is the one present in an unremarkable morning, and it is written in 1 Kings 17:12 that everything came out of the handful that was actually there.