Waiting For Home To Be Home

The rain has been on the window for two hours and it still does not sound like home rain.

That is a ridiculous sentence and she knows it. Rain is rain. But at the old place it came off the flat roof of the extension and hit the concrete by the back step, and it made a particular noise, and you could tell from the noise whether it was worth going out. Here it goes into a gutter she has never seen the end of and makes a thin sound like something running away.

She is sitting on the sofa with a cup of tea going cold beside her, listening to a house she has lived in for one year and seven months.

Everything works. That is what she cannot say to anybody without sounding difficult. The boiler works. The neighbors are perfectly nice. There is a good window in the kitchen. She chose this place, and given the same choice again she would choose it again, and she is grateful, and she says so, often, out loud, to people who are pleased for her.

And it is not hers yet.

The hallway still has three boxes in it. Not because there is nowhere to put the contents. Because the contents are the things she cannot decide about, and every time she goes past the boxes she thinks I will do those at the weekend, and it has been one year and seven months of weekends. There is a picture leaning against the wall in the back bedroom that has never gone up. The spare key is still on the hook where the previous people left it, on a keyring that is not hers, with a plastic tag from a garage in a town she has never been to.

She knows what she is doing. She is not unpacking, because unpacking is a statement.

Some part of her is still waiting for this to be over. And she could not tell you what this is, and she could not tell you what over would look like, and she has stopped asking anybody, because the answers people give are all about curtains.

Now let me stop calling her she.

Because you have the boxes. Maybe it is a country, maybe a flat after a marriage ended, maybe a room in a house that belongs to someone kind. Maybe it is the same house you have always lived in and something happened in it and it has not felt like yours since. You have the picture that has not gone up. You have the at the weekend that has been running for a year. And you have the thing nobody sees, which is that you are living slightly above the floor, the way you do in a hotel, waiting to find out if you are staying.

Put the tea down. Let me sit with you a minute.

The oldest address in the Scriptures

I want to say one thing first and get it out of the way, because it has been sitting on you and it is not true.

The fact that this house has not settled into you yet is not a verdict on you. It is not a sign that you chose wrong, that you are ungrateful, that you have failed to make an effort, or that God is withholding something until you cheer up about the gutter. Rooms take the time they take. A person who has been moved, or who has had a life change shape underneath them, does not become at home on a schedule, and there is no schedule anywhere in the Scriptures for it.

So we are not going to put a date on this. Not one. Not soon, not by spring, not by the time the boxes are done. I am not going to hand you a promise God has not made and then leave you holding it.

Here is what I will hand you, and it is older than any house you have ever stood in.

There is a psalm attributed to a man who spent forty years living in tents, with a whole people who had left one country and had not yet arrived in another. Forty years of this is not it yet. Nobody in that generation ever unpacked. And the line he opens with is not a complaint about the tents.

Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.Psalm 90, verse 1

Read what he does with the word.

He does not say God gave us a dwelling place. He says God is the dwelling place. In a man's mouth who had never had an address, that is not poetry to fill a gap. It is the discovery of his life. The thing he had been waiting for the whole time, the roof, the settledness, the sense of being somewhere, was not a location. It was a Person, and He had been the address the whole way through the wilderness, in all generations, for every one of them, tents and all.

Which means something for you, sitting there with the rain going into the wrong gutter.

You are not homeless while you wait for this house to become home. You have never been homeless for a second. You are living inside a dwelling place that has held every generation of God's people, and it does not need boxes unpacked to be occupied, and you are already fully in it, tonight, with the tea going cold.

And the waiting itself is not silence. That is the other thing this psalm quietly settles. Forty years of tents was not God being absent, it was God traveling. He is not somewhere else, waiting for you to feel settled before He shows up. He has been in these rooms since the day the key turned. He was in the hallway with the boxes this morning while you walked past them and thought at the weekend.

He is not waiting for the house to become home. He is at home in it already, and He is at home in you.