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.

One field, and whole human lives

Let me say something about the count itself, because the mechanism is doing more damage than any one conversation.

It takes a person, a whole one, with a marriage or no marriage, a history, a body, work they are proud of or work they are enduring, a mother they look after, a thing they are scared of at four in the morning, and it reduces that person to one field.

Owns, or does not own.

Then it sorts. Then it places you. Then it reports.

You have been running whole human lives through a single field, and no ranking on earth has ever once been able to say what a life came to. The Holy Spirit is the one who put the smallest bird in that sentence on purpose, and it is written in Psalm 84 that a sparrow hath found an house and a swallow a nest for herself.

And there is something worth knowing about the people at the front of your count, which you cannot see from the car.

Some of them were given the deposit. Some of them bought at a moment that has not existed for fifteen years. Some of them are in houses that are eating them alive and would not say so at a gathering, because a gathering is not where anybody says that.

The field you are ranking on does not record any of that. It records one bit of information per person and then presents the result as though it meant something about effort or worth.

You are comparing a number you can see against lives you cannot, and a count built on one visible fact has never once been a fair one. Psalm 84 has a bird finding a place to put her young and calls that the courts of the Lord, and the Spirit of God is the one who wrote the value in rather than leaving it to the size of the nest.

The sparrow hath found an house

Here is the verse, and it repays sitting with longer than it takes to read.

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)

The man writing this is far from the temple and he wants to be there, and what he reaches for as the image of belonging is not a landowner.

It is a bird that has built in the roof.

She does not own the altar. She has no claim on the building and no paperwork and nobody consulted her. She found a gap in the stonework of the place where God is, and she put her young in it, and the psalmist looks at that and calls her blessed.

You are dwelling where God is and not merely staying there, and a bird with no deed has never once been described in scripture as a bird who is behind. The Holy Spirit is the one who thought that was the right picture, and the written word puts a sparrow in the house of God and calls it a home.

And notice the tense of it. Hath found. Present, completed. Not is looking for. Not will one day have. She has one, now, and it is a home now, and the psalm does not treat it as a stage she is passing through on the way to something more permanent.

That is the correction I want to leave in your hands, and it is not consolation. Where you live is a home. Present tense. Not a waiting room, not a stage, not a temporary arrangement pending the real thing.

You have a home right now and not a placeholder, and the roof over you has never once needed your name on a paper to be the place you live. Psalm 84 gives the sparrow a house in the plainest possible words, and the Spirit of God is the one who does not grade a dwelling by its tenure.