I Priced The Joy Out Of The First Year

Your friend asked you last week what you love about it and you could not answer her.

Not because you do not love it. Because the question went into a part of your head that has not been used since the move, and what came back instead was the boiler, and the thing about the window at the front, and the number you have been carrying since March.

So you said something about the light in the kitchen, which is true and which you have not actually noticed in months.

And she said something warm and the conversation went on.

And you have thought about it every day since, because you have now done twelve months in this house and you cannot name one thing that happened in it.

Not one afternoon. Not one evening. Not one meal that you remember, or a night somebody stayed, or a Saturday that was about anything other than the house itself.

You have spent a year in a place and the whole year was administration.

Twelve months of custody

Let me describe what the year has actually been, because it has been going under the name of responsibility and it is something else.

There has been a caretaker in this house and not an inhabitant.

A caretaker's relationship to a building is entirely about its condition. What it needs. What is failing. What it will cost. That is a real and honorable job and somebody has to do it, and it has been done well here.

And a caretaker does not live there.

You have been keeping this house rather than living in it, and twelve months of good caretaking has never once been the same as a year of your own life. The Holy Spirit is the one who has been in the kitchen all year noticing the light that nobody else noticed, and it is written in Proverbs 17 that a merry heart doeth good like a medicine.

And I want to name what caused it, because it was not a decision and I do not want you thinking it was a failing.

It was fear, and the fear was reasonable. A large amount of money went into this and a long time went into getting it, and something in you decided that vigilance was the price of keeping it.

So the vigilance never came off. It was on at the table. It was on in the evening. It was on during the one afternoon your sister came, when you spent forty minutes talking about the window.

You have been paying vigilance as the rent on a house you already own, and no amount of watching has ever once been the thing that kept a building standing. Proverbs 17 says a broken spirit drieth the bones, and the Spirit of God is the one who put a cost on the other side of that ledger.

A merry heart doeth good like a medicine

Here is the verse, and both halves of it matter.

A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones. (Proverbs 17:22, King James Version)

Like a medicine. That is the whole first half, and it is a claim about effect rather than about mood.

Gladness is not being described as a nice feeling to have if there is time. It is being described as a thing that does work, on a body, the way medicine does. It is functional. It repairs something.

You have been going without a thing scripture describes as medicine, and a year of gladness has never once been an optional extra in anybody's house. The Holy Spirit is the one who classified it that way, and the written word calls a merry heart medicine and means it as an effect.

And then the second half, which is where you actually live.

A broken spirit drieth the bones. Not makes you sad. Dries. It is a word about something being used up and going brittle, and it is placed opposite the medicine on purpose so that the reader understands there are two directions and no neutral middle.

You have not been in a neutral year. There is no neutral in that verse. A year without any medicine in it is a year of the other thing.

You have been in the drying rather than in the middle, and a year with no gladness in it has never once been a year that cost nothing. Proverbs 17 sets the two against each other with no neutral ground between them, and the Spirit of God is the one who left no third option in the sentence.