Downsizing Feels Like A Demotion

The woman at the office said it was a lovely little place and you thanked her.

Little. You have thought about that word roughly once a day since, which tells you something about where you are with this.

It is a good move. You worked it out properly over about seven months, on paper, with your son, and everything about it makes sense. The stairs. The garden, which has been beyond you for two years and which you have not said so about to anybody. The distance to your daughter.

Every single reason is a good one.

And you have not told about six people yet, and three of those are people you have known for forty years.

Because there is a version of this that lands in a certain way when you say it out loud. A woman of sixty eight moving from four bedrooms to two, and everybody nods, and something goes through the room that nobody says, and what goes through the room is a word like winding down.

And the truth is you have been saying that word to yourself, in your own kitchen, since about March.

The direction of travel

Let me say something about the shape you are reading this in, because the shape is the problem rather than the house.

You are reading it as a direction of travel.

Up was four bedrooms, which arrived in your forties after a long time of not having them. Down is two. And once a life is understood as a line with a direction, every move on it becomes a report, and a smaller house can only ever mean one thing.

But that line is a thing somebody invented. It is not how a life works and it is certainly not how scripture describes one.

You have been reading a decision as a direction, and a move made for good reasons has never once been a report on where a life is heading. The Holy Spirit is the one who has been in that kitchen since March, and it is written in 2 Corinthians 4 that we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen.

And I want to point at something you said above without noticing it, because it is the most important sentence in this whole thing.

The garden has been beyond you for two years and nobody has been told.

So one of the truest reasons for this move is a thing you have kept out of every conversation about it, which means everybody you have spoken to has been given a partial account, and a partial account is exactly the kind that sounds like winding down.

You have been offering an incomplete reason and getting an incomplete response, and an account with the true half left out has never once come back sounding right. Second Corinthians 4 puts the unseen things alongside the seen ones as the things actually worth looking at, and the Spirit of God is the one who set the order.

The things which are not seen

Here is the verse, and the contrast in it is not the one people usually take.

While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal. (2 Corinthians 4:18, King James Version)

The things which are seen are temporal.

Paul is writing in the middle of a passage about his own body wearing out. He says the outward man perisheth, plainly, without softening it, and he is not being brave about it. He is stating a fact about a body that is getting older, and he is about your age when he writes it.

And then he says the seen things are temporary, which includes the body and includes a house, and directs the looking somewhere else.

You are being addressed by a man whose own body was wearing out, and nothing in that passage has ever once treated that as a demotion. The Holy Spirit is the one who kept both halves honest, and the written word says the outward man perisheth and puts the looking on what is not seen.

Now here is what I do not want you to hear, because it is the cheap version and you would see through it.

I am not saying the house does not matter because heaven is coming. That sentence gets said to people your age constantly and it is a way of ending a conversation.

What the verse actually gives you is a different set of scales. If the seen things are temporal, then the number of bedrooms is not the material a life is measured in, and it never was, and it was not when there were four either.

You were never measured by four bedrooms, and the move to two has never once been able to take something off a figure that was never counted that way. Second Corinthians 4 calls the seen things temporal in both directions, and the Spirit of God is the one who applied it to the good years as well.