I Price Every House I Walk Into

You looked it up in the car outside your friend's house.

You had a good evening. You like them, the food was good, you laughed at something for a long time. And you got into the car and before you had put your seatbelt on you had opened your phone and typed their road into it.

It took about eleven seconds. You did not decide to do it.

And then you drove home doing arithmetic.

I want to look at this properly, because it is the last article on this site, and it is the one that matters most for the next twenty years of your life.

You have a scoreboard. And you did not build it deliberately, and you have never once examined its rules.

Notice how much information it can hold. One number per person, updated whenever you are in their house or hear about a move. And notice that the scoreboard has no upper limit, no finish line, and no mechanism whatsoever for ever declaring you to have done well enough.

That last part is the one I want you to sit with.

There is no number on that scoreboard that would settle it. You believe there is. You have a rough figure in mind that would mean you had arrived, and I can tell you with complete confidence what will happen if you reach it, because it happens to everybody: the figure will move, quietly, within about two weeks, and you will not notice it moving, and you will be exactly as far from arriving as you are tonight.

A scoreboard that cannot be won is not a measure of success. It is a machine for producing insufficiency, and yours has been running since you were about twenty five.

A man's life consisteth not

Here is the sentence, and I want to be precise about what it says, because it is usually quoted in a way that blunts it.

And he said unto them, Take heed, and beware of covetousness: for a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things which he possesseth. (Luke 12:15, King James Version)

Consisteth not.

That is not a recommendation about priorities. It is a statement about composition. He is saying that the stuff a life is actually made of does not include the quantity of things owned. Not a small part. Not a part to be kept in proportion. Not in it at all.

You have been measuring with an instrument that does not touch the thing being measured, and a square footage has never once been one of the materials a life is built from. The Holy Spirit is the one who put that in the plainest available words, and it is written in Luke 12 that a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of his possessions.

And notice the warning attached to it: take heed, and beware. That is the language used about danger rather than about tidiness. He is not correcting an untidy set of priorities. He is warning about something that gets into a person and does damage.

Which is exactly what you have described. Eleven seconds. Seatbelt not on yet. No decision made anywhere in the process.

You have a machine running in you that you never installed, and an automatic habit has never once been the same as a thing you chose. Luke 12 calls it something to beware of rather than something to be ashamed of, and the Spirit of God is the one who names a danger without naming you as one.

Contentment is not the answer here

Now I want to be careful, because the obvious move at this point would make your situation worse, and it is the move almost everybody makes.

If I tell you to be content, then within a week the assessment would simply move to how content you managed to be. That is a scoreboard with a different label on it. Same machine, new units, and now with a religious weight behind it so that losing is also a spiritual failure.

I am not doing that to you.

You are not being handed a second scoreboard with holier numbers, and no instruction in scripture has ever once been designed to give you one more thing to fail at. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes an instrument away instead of recalibrating it, and luke 12 removes the measure rather than replacing it.

Here is what I want instead, and it is much smaller and much more concrete.

At the moment, when you walk into a house, exactly one fact is available to you about it, and your machine reads that fact instantly. The fix is not to stop reading it. The fix is to make a second fact available, because a machine with only one input has nothing to compete with.

The second fact is what happened in the room.

You have rooms full of things that actually occurred, and a number attached to a house has never once been able to hold any of them. The written word says a life consisteth not in possessions, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps the record of what a life did consist of.