A House That Is Not Theirs

The question came at half past nine at night in the doorway of a bedroom, which is where the real questions come.

Her daughter is thirteen. They had been talking about something else entirely, about a friend moving away and the friend's new house, and then the girl said, in a voice deliberately arranged to sound casual: when we move, where will we go?

And she said, without thinking, that they were not moving.

And the girl said: no, but when.

It is a fair question. The girl has done the arithmetic that children do. She has worked out that the house is not theirs, because she has been told, correctly, over many years, in small ways: we would have to ask before we do that, careful with the door frame, we cannot take that out because it is not ours.

She is thirteen and she has never lived anywhere they own, and she has understood for a while that this arrangement has a hinge in it, and that the hinge is her mother's job.

Here is the small thing that has stayed with her. In the second bedroom there is a wall where, in any other house, there would be things stuck up. There are things stuck up. But every one of them is on a strip of the blue putty rather than a pin, because when they moved in they were asked, very kindly and entirely reasonably, to use putty rather than pins, and a nine year old heard that and has used putty ever since without ever being reminded again.

Four years of putty. Nobody made a rule. She just understood the terms.

And the mother stood in that doorway at half past nine with a girl asking a reasonable question and found she had nothing to say that was both true and comforting, so she said something about how they were fine for a long time yet, and kissed her, and went and sat on the stairs.

A place prepared, and who He said it to

There is a sentence about a house that gets read at funerals so often that people have stopped hearing what kind of moment it was said in.

In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.John 14:2

Now look at who is in the room.

He says this on the last night, to men who are about to lose every stable thing they have. Within about eighteen hours their teacher will be dead, their movement will look finished, and they will be scattered, hiding, and homeless in every sense that matters. He knows all of that as He says it.

And what He hands them is not a promise about property. It is a place, prepared, in His Father's house, and He says it in the future active: I go to prepare. He is doing the work of it Himself, in advance, for named people.

So hear this, sitting on the stairs: your children's belonging does not rest on a deed. That is not my consolation; it is what His word says the Lord was doing about a place while everything else those men had was being taken, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes a verse worn smooth by funerals and makes it useful to a woman on a Tuesday night.

Now let me get at the thing that hurt in that doorway, because it was not really the question.

What hurt was that you had no answer. And underneath that is the fear that your daughter is growing up with a small permanent provisionality in her, a sense that everything is on loan, and that this is a thing you have done to her by being what you are.

That fear deserves an honest response and not a soothing one. So here is the honest one.

She has learned that a building is not permanent. That is true. She learned it at nine, over putty, which is younger than most people learn it, and it is a real cost and I am not going to talk you out of it.

But look at what she has not learned. She has not learned that she is not wanted anywhere. She has not learned that people are temporary. Everything provisional in that child's life is made of brick, and nothing provisional in it is made of people, and that distinction is the whole difference between a child who is unsettled and a child who is unattached.

You are not damaging her. His word is entirely comfortable with people whose address was not their own; it opens with a man leaving a city for tents and ends with a prepared place, and the Holy Spirit is not standing on your stairs at half past nine reading your daughter's putty as evidence against you.

And here is the one to keep. The place being prepared is not compensation for the one you do not own. It is the real one, and it is prepared specifically, by name, and your daughter's name is in that sentence exactly as much as anybody's. A thirteen year old who has never had a deed still has a place that has been under construction on her behalf since before she was born.

You may bless her tonight without promising her a house. Scripture never once puts a child's future under a parent's authority, and the Holy Spirit is the one who settles a person, in His own way and at His own pace, in ways no mortgage has ever been able to do.