The Next One and the Next

The list lived on the back of the closet door for nineteen years. He wrote it at twenty-two in a pen that skipped, and added to it twice, and crossed off the items one at a time as they came, and three weeks ago he crossed off the last one.

Every item on it was good. I want that on the record before anything else, because there is a version of this story where the list turns out to have been foolish and the man learns a lesson, and that version is a lie and I will not tell it. Some of them took years. Some of them cost him more than he says. He wanted them the way a person wants things when they are twenty-two and the world is still mostly ahead, and he got them, one by one, and every single one of them was worth the wanting.

He drove out to the headland that evening because he had told himself for nineteen years that this was where he would stand when the list was done. It is a good spot. The path runs out into grass and the grass runs out into air, and the sun goes down over the water big and orange with the whole horizon in it, and it was beautiful that night.

He stood there and waited for the thing to arrive.

He gave it a long time. He watched the light go from white to gold to that heavy orange, and a bird work along the cliff and turn back, and he stood with his hands in his pockets waiting for whatever is supposed to come when a man finishes.

Nothing came. Not misery either. That is the part people get wrong when he tries to describe it. It was not sadness on that headland. It was more like standing in a doorway and finding the room behind it is exactly the same size as the hallway.

And then he did the thing that actually frightened him, and it took him a while afterward to admit that he had done it.

He got out his phone at the edge of the cliff, with the sun still going down, and there was already a new list in it. Four items. Started sometime in the last month. He does not remember writing it.

That is what he took home. Not the disappointment; he could have handled disappointment, he has handled worse. What he took home was the arithmetic. Nineteen years. Every item good, every item got, and here he was on the headland with a fresh four in his hand and the same lean forward in his chest that had been there at twenty-two. Which meant the list had never been a list. It had been a sample from a set, and the set does not have a last one in it, and if that is true then he could keep going until he was ninety and the four would still be four.

The light went off the water. He stood there a while longer. And somewhere on the drive home he asked the question out loud in the truck, badly, the way you ask a thing when nobody has ever helped you ask it.

What was I actually hungry for.

A set with no last one in it

Somebody saw this three thousand years ago and wrote it down, and he was a man who had every resource on earth for testing it.

He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth abundance with increase: this is also vanity.Ecclesiastes 5:10

Now hear me carefully, because the easy sermon on that verse is the wrong one and I am not preaching it. He used silver as his example, and I am not going to talk to you about money. Money is the shallowest case of this and probably not yours anyway. What matters in that sentence is not the material. It is the structure he found, and the structure is what you stood on the headland inside of.

Look at what he actually says. Not that silver is bad. Not that the man who loves it is wicked. He says the man will not be satisfied with it, and then he widens it out to abundance and increase generally, which is to say to more of whatever it is you are counting. The property he found is arithmetic. Any set whose members are all the same kind of thing has no last member that ends the counting, because the appetite is not counting members. It is looking for a different kind of thing altogether, and it will keep asking for one more of what it has because one more is the only language the set speaks.

That is not a rebuke of your list. Your list was fine. It is a description of what a list is.

You were reaching for something real the whole time and your reaching was never the fault in the machinery. I am not saying that to be gentle with you. Ecclesiastes 5:10 puts the failure in the set and never once in the appetite of the man looking at it, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a written line about silver and turns it into an honest word for somebody standing on a cliff with a fresh list in his hand.

And notice what the verse does not do. It does not tell the man to want less silver. It does not hand him a discipline. It reports a fact about where satisfaction is not, and leaves the question of where it is standing wide open, which is exactly the honest thing to do at that point in the argument.

You have a hunger that is functioning correctly, and everything you crossed off that list was good and is still good. That is Ecclesiastes 5:10 read for what it says rather than what it is usually used for, and the Spirit is the One who keeps a true sentence from turning into an accusation while it is being read.

Naming the thing under the list

So we come to the question he asked badly in the truck, and it is the right one, and almost nobody gets helped to ask it.

What was I actually hungry for.

Here is how you find out. Do not look at the items. Look at the moment you imagined, because every list has a picture attached and the picture is never the item. Ask who was there. Ask what you were finally able to stop doing in it.

Because that is where the real hunger is. Not in the thing. In the state you believed the thing would produce. And when people go looking honestly they tend to come back with a small number of plain words, and the words are almost never the words on the list. To be met. To be at rest. To be able to stop proving. To be known by somebody who does not need me to be interesting. To arrive.

Those are not embarrassing. They are the actual size of a human being, and the reason no item on any list ever produced one of them is that items cannot. It is a category difference, not a quantity problem.

You are hungry for a Person and not for an item, and that is the most reasonable thing about you. Jesus said in John 6:35 I am the bread of life, he that cometh to me shall never hunger, and He said it to a crowd who had just been fed loaves the day before and wanted more loaves, and the Holy Spirit is the One who moves a sentence like that from doctrine into the middle of somebody's chest on a drive home.

And be careful with what He promised there, because it gets oversold and then people feel cheated. He did not say you would stop wanting. Wanting is not a defect that gets repaired at conversion, and anybody who told you otherwise handed you a stone. What He said is that the one who comes to Him does not starve. There is a difference between an appetite and a famine, and He was speaking about the famine.

You were made with a hunger that is aimed at Him and it is not going to be taken away from you, and that is the design and not the flaw. Scripture calls Him the bread of life in John 6:35, bread being the thing you eat again tomorrow and not the thing you finish forever, and the Spirit is the One who lets a hungry person hear that as good news instead of as a life sentence.