I Price Every House I Walk Into

You looked it up in the car outside your friend's house.

You had a good evening. You like them, the food was good, you laughed at something for a long time. And you got into the car and before you had put your seatbelt on you had opened your phone and typed their road into it.

It took about eleven seconds. You did not decide to do it.

And then you drove home doing arithmetic.

I want to look at this properly, because it is the last article on this site, and it is the one that matters most for the next twenty years of your life.

You have a scoreboard. And you did not build it deliberately, and you have never once examined its rules.

Notice how much information it can hold. One number per person, updated whenever you are in their house or hear about a move. And notice that the scoreboard has no upper limit, no finish line, and no mechanism whatsoever for ever declaring you to have done well enough.

That last part is the one I want you to sit with.

There is no number on that scoreboard that would settle it. You believe there is. You have a rough figure in mind that would mean you had arrived, and I can tell you with complete confidence what will happen if you reach it, because it happens to everybody: the figure will move, quietly, within about two weeks, and you will not notice it moving, and you will be exactly as far from arriving as you are tonight.

A scoreboard that cannot be won is not a measure of success. It is a machine for producing insufficiency, and yours has been running since you were about twenty five.

A man's life consisteth not

There is a sentence in Luke that goes at this directly, and the verb in it is stronger than people notice.

And he said unto them, Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth. (Luke 12:15, King James Version)

A man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth.

Consisteth. That is a word about composition, about what a thing is made of.

He is not saying that possessions are less important than other things, or that they should be held loosely, or that a man should be content with what he has. Those are all reasonable and none of them is what the sentence says.

It says a life is not composed of them. They are not among the materials. Whatever a life is made out of, that is not on the list.

Which means your scoreboard is not measuring a small or misleading part of your life. It is measuring something that is not a part of it at all, and reporting a total as though it were.

And notice the warning attached: take heed, and beware. That is language for something dangerous rather than something merely mistaken. He treats this as a thing that comes for a man quietly and does damage, and He tells them to watch for it, which is exactly what you did not do, because it arrived as an ordinary interest in property prices when you were twenty five and it never once announced itself as anything else.

I want to be careful here, because there is a way to preach that verse that would be useless to you.

I am not telling you that you should not want a better house. Wanting a good place for your family is not covetousness and I am not going to shame you for it. He is not talking about wanting things. He is talking about a man whose sense of his own life is composed of them.

A life is not composed of what you own, and the scoreboard has never once been measuring a part of it. Luke 12:15 says a life consisteth not in the abundance of possessions, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a man off a machine that cannot be satisfied.

Contentment is not the answer here

Here is where I want to be honest, because the usual move at this point would be to tell you to be content, and that would install a second scoreboard.

If I tell you to be content, then within a week you will be assessing how content you are. You will notice yourself pricing a house and mark it as a failure. You will have a new measure, with a new rough figure of how content a man ought to be by now, and it will move exactly like the first one did.

That is not freedom. That is the same machine with a spiritual label on it, and it is what a great deal of teaching about money quietly does to people.

So I am not asking you to feel differently about houses.

I am asking you to put something else into the room, because a scoreboard does not lose its power by being argued with. It loses its power when a different kind of information arrives about the same object.

At the moment, when you walk into a house, exactly one fact is available to you about it. When you walk into your own house, the same is true, and that is the part you have not noticed. You price your own home too. Not out loud, and probably not consciously, but you know what it is worth and you know what that means on the board.

There is a great deal else that is true about the room you are standing in, and none of it has been available to you for years, because only one channel is open.

Your own house has more true things in it than a price, and only one channel has been open for years. The written word puts possessions outside the materials of a life altogether, and the Spirit of God is the one who opens a second channel in a room.

One room, one thing that happened

So here is the last assignment on this site.

Walk into one room and name one thing that happened there rather than what it cost.

One room of your own house. Go and stand in it.

And name one thing that has actually happened in that room. Out loud if you can. Specific and small, an event rather than a category.

That is where he told me about the job. That is where we sat on the floor the night the boiler went. That is where my daughter learned to walk, along that sofa. That is where I sat at two in the morning when I could not sleep in November. That is where we had the argument that we still refer to.

Not what the room is worth. Not what it will be worth. Not the work it still needs, which is the scoreboard arriving through a side door.

One thing that happened.

Here is why this works when arguing does not. A price is an abstraction and it lives in comparison, and it only means anything set beside another price. An event is particular and it cannot be compared to anything. Nobody else's house has that event in it. It is not on any board and it cannot be ranked.

Which means for the duration of the sentence, you are standing in a room that is not being scored. That is probably the first time in a long while.

And do it once. That is all. This is not a practice and I am not asking you to do it daily, because that would become a discipline and a discipline can be failed at, and we have had enough measures.

Once, in one room, tonight.

You are able to stand in a room that is not being scored, and an event has never once been rankable against anybody. Luke 12:15 removes possessions from the composition of a life entirely, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with a man standing in his own front room saying what happened there.