The Lord is my Fried Chicken

Psalm 16, Verses 5-6 says:

The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup;

you hold my lot.
The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.

As I read this, I found myself pausing over the word portion. I've worked in the food service industry. Portion is a word that gets used a lot. In my particular restaurant, we sold 'portion cups' full of hot creamy melted "cheddar" for 25 cents - perfect for dipping those seasoned curly fries in. I can taste them right now...going right to my thighs. I digress. Nowadays, the word portion makes me think more of a bucket of fried chicken - which portion do you like best? I'm a white meat kind of girl. My kids, on the other hand, love those drumsticks. They would fight to the death for the last drumstick.

Speaking of my kids, if you talk to them about a portion they might think about maple bars. You see, every once in awhile we'll get maple bar from the doughnut display case at the local grocery store. Just one. How many kids do I have? Three. Yep, they get to share that maple bar. I am firm believer that a maple bar is just too much doughnut for any one child to be entrusted with. So they share. And we have a system in our family for ensuring that the maple bar is evenly distributed. Child #1 cuts the bar into three pieces. Child #2 gets first pick, Child #3 gets second pick, and Child #1 gets the piece that is left over. I'll tell you what, you have NEVER seen such exactly identical portions of a maple bar! No one section is even a millimeter longer than any other!

At the time in which David was composing his Psalms, though, and as indicated in verse 6 above, a very significant meaning of the word portion had to do with the land. The Lord had brought his people Israel into the land He had promised them, and when He did so, the twelve tribes of Israel had to divide the land among them. Each tribe (except the priestly Levitical tribe - Levi) received a portion of the land as their inheritance from the Lord.

With that terminology in mind, look again at what David says: The LORD is my chosen portion. David says, "Land? Who cares about land. Land changes hands all the time and it can be devastated in an instant. Ya'll can HAVE your land. All I want is the LORD." I can say the same: All I want is Jesus! Look what else David says though: The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup. What? The Lord is my cup? What is that supposed to mean? So, if I dig the Seahawks, should I go around saying, "Bro, the Seahawks are my CUP." Huh? Um, no.

In Biblical poetry, to say that someone or something is your cup, is to say that it's your condition in life, your lot, the hand you've been dealt. So it's like saying "Jesus is the hand I've been dealt in life." Whoa! Think about that - really, what more could you want?! You see, we're all dealt a hand of cards to play in the game of life, and if we don't see God in it, we often don't see how we can possibly win with what we've got. We think we've got a losing hand. If, however, we see God's hand in our hand, well then, we know that with Him, all things are possible. It doesn't matter how bad of a hand we've been dealt, with Jesus, we can win!

If we choose the Lord as our portion, and let his hand be our guide, we'll see the boundary lines of our lives encompass a beautiful inheritance, which isn't always found only on Earth. It's heaven. For eternity.