Nine Years of Rooms

Priya had walked through that house in her head so many times that the real hallway felt slightly wrong, like a song played half a step down.

Nine years. Nine years of a spreadsheet she updated on the first Saturday of every month, of holidays not taken, of a car kept going past the point where keeping it going was funny, of saying no in a particular gentle way she had gotten so good at that people had stopped asking. Nine years of a photograph on the inside of a kitchen cupboard door, printed off a listings site, of a house that was not even the house she eventually got.

The agent handed her the keys in the afternoon and said congratulations and meant it, and drove away, and Priya stood in the front room of a house that was entirely hers.

She had imagined this part most of all. She had imagined it as a kind of sound. Not music exactly. More like the noise a crowd makes when something finally goes in.

The room was very quiet.

She walked through all of it, which took four minutes. She opened the cupboard under the stairs. She looked at the place where the boiler was. She went up and stood in the back bedroom, which had the good light, and looked out at a garden that would be a serious problem by August.

And then she sat down on the floor, because there was nothing to sit on, and she waited.

That is the part that catches people. She genuinely waited. Somewhere under the ribs she was waiting for the arrival of the person she had been saving toward for nine years, the one who lived in this house and was different.

Nobody arrived. It was just her, sitting on a floor in a good light, with the same quiet she had brought in from the car.

At about seven she ordered food she could not taste and ate it out of the container with the front door open because it was warm. And what came into her head, without any warning, was a Tuesday evening about eleven years ago when she had been broke, properly broke, sharing a flat with two people whose names she could still recite, and one of them had knocked on her door at eleven at night holding two cups and said, I made too much tea, are you awake.

That was all. Too much tea. And a person in the doorway.

Priya sat on the floor of a house that had cost her nine years and understood that she had been carrying the wrong container to the well the whole time, and that it had been leaking the entire way.

Say the word properly, before anything else

I want to be plain about what wealth means on this site, because the word is slippery and I would rather be clear than clever with a person sitting on a floor.

Wealth here is a portion. Not a balance, not a total, not a place. A portion is the old table word for what is set down in front of you because you belong there, and the written word takes that ordinary word and does something outrageous with it: God says of certain people that He Himself is their portion. That is the only meaning this word carries here, and it is not a consolation prize handed to the people who did not get the real thing.

And I want to be equally plain the other way. Money is not wicked, owning a house is not a sin, and wanting relief from years of pressure is not unspiritual. Nothing on this page connects what God does to what you have or to what you give, and that wire will never be run here. If you are actually short, if there is a date and a figure and a knot in your stomach, that is a real thing that deserves a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that. Nothing here is a rebuke for wanting your life to be easier.

What I want to do is much smaller. I want to name what was missing from those rooms, and I want the Holy Spirit to name it rather than me.

Two things, and only one of them holds

Jeremiah says the strangest sentence in the prophets about this, and he says it as a courtroom charge rather than an insult.

For my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water.Jeremiah 2:13

Notice what he does not say. He does not say the cistern was a stupid idea. Hewing a cistern out of rock is enormous work, skilled work, the work of a person who is taking the future seriously. Nobody digs a cistern out of laziness. You dig one because you are trying to make sure there will be water later.

That is what nine years of Saturdays was. It was not greed and it was not shallowness. It was a serious woman doing serious work to make sure there would be water later, and the Holy Spirit does not need that corrected before He can speak to you.

You are not being corrected for the digging. You are being told what a cistern is, which is a thing that holds water it did not make, and only for as long as it does not crack. That is what the word says about it, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a person hear that as relief instead of as a rebuke tonight.

And you have a fountain. Present tense, not pending, not scheduled for whenever you finally feel differently about the house. His word calls Him the fountain of living waters and the whole point of a fountain is that it is moving before you get there and it is moving after you leave, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a fact in a room rather than a phrase in a book.

What was actually missing from those rooms

Think about what undid you with the container of food on your knees. It was not the tea. Tea is not scarce.

It was the knock. It was somebody on the other side of a door at eleven at night deciding you were worth two cups instead of one. You were hungry to be come to. You still are.

That hunger has been read by half the people carrying it as evidence of something wrong with them, some inability to be satisfied, some fault in the wiring. It is not. Scripture treats that thirst as the most reasonable thing about a human being and then does something no cistern can do: it puts a Person on the other side of it. The Spirit is not sent to explain your thirst to you. He is sent because the thirst was right.

So the house could not carry what you asked it to carry. It was never a knock. It is a good thing, honestly earned, and it was asked to do a job it was never built to do, and a thing failing at a job it was never built for is not a verdict on the person who built it.

Here is what the word has already settled, so the Spirit can settle it in you tonight: you are not nine years behind on becoming someone worth coming to. You were come to. God did not wait at the end of the saving with His arms folded to see whether you would make it. He came to a stable and He came to a well at noon to talk to a woman everybody else avoided, and He has been in the doorway the whole way through, holding two cups.