I Measure Against The House My Parents Worked For

Your father came over in March and stood in the kitchen with a cup of coffee and said it was a good house.

He meant it. He was pleased. He said it twice.

And you have been unable to think about that afternoon since without the other thing arriving beside it, which is that he built the extension on their place himself over two summers with a man from his work, and that your mother did four years of nights, and that between them they did all of that on less than you make now.

They had five of you.

So you come in through your own door in the evening and something runs, every time, and it is not a feeling exactly. It is more like a conversion. You look at what you have and you convert it into what they would have done with it, and the answer comes back short, and then you put your keys down and go and see the children.

You have never said a word about this to anybody. Certainly not to him.

And if you did, he would not understand what you were talking about, because in his version of this he is proud of you and the story has a happy ending.

What the conversion is actually doing

Let me describe the machine, because once it has a shape it stops being the weather.

You take your circumstances, run them through what your parents did with theirs, and produce a number that represents the gap. And you do that every evening, in a doorway, in about two seconds.

And the machine has a flaw that makes it useless as a measurement, which is that it only ever runs in one direction.

It converts your resources into their achievement. It never converts their resources into your circumstances, because you cannot see theirs from the inside. You did not live their thirty years. You were a child in that house and what you remember is the extension going up, not the eleven things that were not in that house because the extension was going up.

You have a conversion that only runs one way, and a comparison that cannot be reversed has never once been a measurement of anything. The Holy Spirit is the one who has been standing in a doorway with a man putting his keys down, and it is written in Exodus 20 that thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house.

And I want to say something about that commandment before we go further, because I am not about to accuse you of anything.

You do not want their house. That is not what is happening here and the word covet does not quite land on it.

What is happening is closer and stranger: you want to have been the man who could have done what they did. You are not comparing possessions. You are comparing what a life produced, and using a set of circumstances that you did not see and cannot reconstruct.

You have been running a comparison you were never able to complete, and a childhood memory of a house has never once been the whole of what it cost to build one. Exodus 20 forbids the eye that goes across to another household and starts totalling, and the Spirit of God is the one who put that at the end of the ten rather than at the beginning.

Thou shalt not covet what is thy neighbor's

Here is the commandment, and look at how much of it is a list.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's. (Exodus 20:17, King James Version)

House, wife, servants, animals, and then: nor any thing that is thy neighbor's.

That last clause closes every door. It is not a list of forbidden items with gaps between them. It sweeps up the whole category, and the category is: other people's.

Now notice something about this commandment that the other nine do not have. It is the only one entirely about the inside of a person. Nobody can see it happen. There is no visible act. A man could keep the other nine in public and run this one all day in a doorway.

You have been keeping a commandment in every visible way and running the forbidden thing where nobody can see it, and a machine that is invisible has never once been a machine that costs nothing. The Holy Spirit is the one who put the one about the inside of a man at the end, and the written word closes the category with a clause that covers everything.

And I want to hand you something better than guilt here, because guilt will not get this machine turned off.

The reason it is forbidden is not that God is protective of your parents' achievements. It is that a man doing this is not in his own life. He is in a doorway, in somebody else's nineteen eighties, doing arithmetic, while his own children are in the next room.

You are being kept out of your own evening by a sum, and no comparison anywhere has ever once been able to happen at the same time as a life. Exodus 20 puts this last and locates it entirely inside a person, and the Spirit of God is the one who knows what it costs the man running it.