Everybody I Grew Up With Owns

You replayed one conversation the whole way home.

It was a small one. Somebody asked where you are living now, and you told them, and they said something perfectly pleasant, and then they said something about their own place and how the work on the kitchen was going.

Nothing in that exchange was unkind. Nobody was showing off. It was two people making conversation at a gathering.

And you got in the car and thought about it for forty minutes.

Because you did the count on the way home. You went through everybody you grew up with, one at a time, and worked out who owns and who does not, and the answer came out badly, and you have done that count before and you will do it again.

I want to look at that count, because I do not think you have ever examined it, and it is doing something to you every year.

You are running a race that you did not enter.

There was no starting gun. Nobody told you the distance or the rules or what the prize is. You never agreed to be measured on this, and you cannot recall a day when you decided that owning property was going to be one of the ways you would assess whether your life was going acceptably.

And yet the count runs. Every reunion, every wedding, every conversation about kitchens. And you always come out somewhere near the back, and each year the field gets further ahead.

That is not a race. A race has rules and an entry and a finish, and this has none of those. What you have is a ranking that runs automatically against a group of people you happened to attend school with, using one measure that was chosen for you by nobody, and it cannot be won and it does not end.

The sparrow hath found an house

There is a line in the Psalms about a bird making a home, and where it makes it is the point.

Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, even thine altars, O LORD of hosts, my King, and my God. (Psalm 84:3, King James Version)

Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself.

Notice the word used. The sparrow has found a house.

Not built. Not bought. Not owned. Found. A bird has located a place in something that belongs to somebody else entirely, and the psalm calls it a house without any qualification whatsoever.

And look at where it is. Even thine altars. The bird has nested in the temple, which is about as clearly not hers as a place can be. She has no claim on it, no deed, no arrangement, and nobody consulted her about the building or its future.

And the psalmist, who is writing the whole psalm out of longing to be in that temple himself, looks at the bird and does not pity her.

He envies her. That is the point of the verse in context. He is saying: even the sparrow gets to live there, and I do not. The bird with no claim on the building is the one in the good position, and he says so.

There is no version of that verse in which the sparrow's arrangement is provisional, or a stage on the way to something, or a lesser form of housing. She has found a house and she is laying her young in it and it is described as being in the best place in the world.

You have found a house, and finding it has never once been a lesser thing than owning it. Psalm 84:3 calls the found nest a house without qualification and envies the bird who has it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a ranking off somebody driving home from a gathering.

The count measures one thing

Here is the practical part, and it is about what the count is actually capable of seeing.

The count has one input.

It can tell whether a name owns property. That is the entire dataset. It cannot see what anybody's marriage is like, whether they sleep at night, whether their work means anything to them, what they did for their mother last year, or whether they are frightened in a way they have told nobody about.

You are ranking a group of whole human lives on a single field, and the field is the one that is publicly visible, which is precisely why it became the field.

And there is something worth knowing about the people at the front of your count. Several of them are further from paid for than you imagine, some of them are in houses that are currently a source of strain rather than security, and at least one of them, at that gathering, was doing exactly the same count you were and reached a different unfavorable conclusion about themselves on a different measure.

That is not a comfort about how everybody is secretly unhappy. Most of them are fine. It is a statement about the resolution of your instrument. The count sees one bit of information per person and reports as though it had seen a life.

What you are measuring has one field in it, and the count has never once been able to see a life. The written word calls a nest in somebody else's building a house and envies the bird in it, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present with a person driving home doing arithmetic on her friends.

One good thing, out loud, in the room

So here is the assignment, and the location matters as much as the sentence.

Name one good thing about where you live tonight, out loud, in the room.

Out loud. Not thought about approvingly, which you have done and which does nothing. Said, in a voice, in the room it is about.

One thing, and small and specific rather than grand. The light in the afternoon on the far wall. That the shop is two minutes away. That the boiler works. That you can hear the trees. That your friend can get here easily. That the kitchen is warm in the mornings.

And in the room. Standing in it, or sitting in it, addressing the place you actually live rather than an idea of housing.

Here is why this is not positive thinking, which I would not offer you.

At the moment your home has only one adjective attached to it, and the adjective is rented, and it functions as a category rather than a description. Everything about the place is filed under that one word, and the word carries the ranking with it, so you cannot look at the flat without the count arriving.

Saying one specific true good thing out loud puts a second fact in the room. Not a better feeling. A fact, about that place, that is independent of who owns it and that would still be true if you did.

Do that a few times over two weeks and the place stops being an example of your position and starts being a house you live in, which is what it has been the whole time.

You are able to put one true fact about this place beside the word rented, and one adjective has never once been able to describe a home. Psalm 84:3 names the found nest a house plainly, and the Holy Spirit is the one present in a room where somebody says one good thing out loud.