I Am Not Going To Buy And I Am Tired Of Defending It

You have a version that takes about ninety seconds and you have given it more times than you can count.

It has three parts. There is the part about the work and the traveling, which is true. There is the part about what you would be tied to, which is also true. And there is the part at the end, the one you added about two years in, where you say something light about how you might one day, which is not true at all and which you put there because of what happens in people's faces when you do not.

You gave it again on Sunday, to a man you had met four minutes earlier.

And you drove home and thought: I have now explained the shape of my own life to a stranger in a parking lot, and I did it voluntarily, and nobody made me.

Here is the thing I want to put in front of you, and it is not about housing.

You are not defending a decision. You are apologizing for one.

A defense is what you offer when somebody has a legitimate claim on the matter. Your ninety seconds has been offered, over and over, to people who have no standing in it whatsoever, and you have been offering it as though they did, and that is what has worn you out.

Who is actually asking

Let me separate the people, because they are not all doing the same thing and they have been treated here as one crowd.

Some of them are making conversation. That is most of them. Somebody asks about housing the way they ask about work, because it is a thing people ask, and they would be perfectly content with a short answer and no reasons at all.

Some of them are asking about themselves. They are checking their own position against yours, which is not about you, and your ninety seconds does nothing for them either way.

And a very small number genuinely think you are making a mistake and want to say so, and those are the ones your whole script was built for, and there are about two of them and you have been running the script for everybody.

You have been answering a question that almost nobody is actually asking, and a short answer has never once been the same as a rude one. The Holy Spirit is the one who wrote that up as faith rather than as a stage, and it is written in Hebrews 11 that Abraham sojourned in the land of promise as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles.

And now the part that I think is the actual sore place, and it is the clause on the end.

The clause about maybe, at some point. It went in so that people's faces would settle, and every time it gets said it concedes, slightly, the premise you disagree with: that the decision is provisional, that buying is the destination, and that this is a road rather than a place.

That clause has cost you more than all the rest of the script.

You have been conceding the point at the end of every sentence, and a clause added to settle somebody's face has never once been a small thing to say. Hebrews 11 has a man living in a tent in the middle of the promise and calls it faith, and the Spirit of God is the one who put the tent in the commendation.

Dwelling in tabernacles

Here is the passage, and it is stranger than it looks.

By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise. (Hebrews 11:9, King James Version)

By faith he dwelt in tents.

Read that again, because the sentence is doing something unusual. Abraham is in the land. He is standing on the ground that was promised to him. And what he does there, the thing named as an act of faith, is live in a tent.

He could have built. He had the means and he had the time and he had three generations there with him. And the text does not treat the tent as a failure to get round to it or as a stage before the real thing.

It treats it as the faith.

You are permitted to live in something you do not own and have that be the whole of the arrangement, and a tent in scripture has never once been described as a house that had not happened yet. The Holy Spirit is the one who put those two words in that order, and the written word says by faith he dwelt in tabernacles.

Now I will be careful, because the next verse says he looked for a city whose builder and maker is God, and people use that to say the tent was only temporary after all.

Read it properly. The city he was looking for is not a house in Canaan. It is the one God builds, and nobody in that chapter received it, and the whole passage says so plainly at the end.

So the tent was not a waiting room for a better address in the same land. It was the way he lived, permanently, while hoping for something no sale could deliver.

You are living the way that chapter describes rather than the way it warns about, and nothing in Hebrews 11 has ever once made a tent into an unfinished house. Hebrews 11 commends the dwelling in tabernacles as an act rather than as a phase, and the Spirit of God is the one who wrote the commendation.