I Still Have The Listing Open

There are twenty two of them and you know the order.

Kitchen from the doorway. Kitchen from the other side. The room at the front with the bay window that the light comes into in the second picture and not the fourth, which means they photographed it across a morning.

The stairs. The landing. The small room you had decided about.

You go through them at night, after the house is quiet, and you do it slowly, and you have done it so many times now that you notice new things that are not there, like the corner of a radiator in the seventh picture that you had never seen before.

And you know how it looks. You know that if anybody walked in you would close the laptop the way you would close a drawer.

Somebody said last week that you need to stop torturing yourself. They meant it kindly. And the strange part, the part you have not told anyone, is that it does not feel like torture at all. It feels like the only part of the day where the house is still available.

That is what makes it hard to stop. You are not going back to hurt. You are going back to visit.

Looking is not remembering

Let me say what I think the twenty two pictures are actually doing, because I do not think it is what the person who told you to stop believes it is doing.

Remembering has an end to it. You think about a thing, and something in you moves, and then it settles, and you carry on with the evening. It is a completed motion.

Looking has no end. The photographs are always exactly as good as they were the first time. Nothing degrades and nothing resolves, so there is nowhere for the visit to finish, and a hundred visits leave a person no further along than the first week left her.

That is why it feels restful and leaves you tired.

You are doing something that never completes, and going back to those pictures has never once been the same as keeping the house. It is written in Job that a man may be in neither safety nor rest, and yet trouble came, and the Holy Spirit is the one sitting up with a woman at eleven at night in the light of a screen.

And here is the tenderness in it, which nobody has offered you. You are not obsessed. You are attached, which is different, and attachment is what human beings do to places and not a character fault.

You spent six weeks becoming attached to a set of rooms. Then the attachment was severed by a phone call, in one sentence, with no process and no ceremony at all. Nobody took you back to say goodbye to it. There was no last walk through.

You have never been given a single moment to say goodbye to those rooms, and going looking for one has never once been a weakness in you. Job 3 says plainly that he had no rest and trouble came, and the Spirit of God let that stay on the page without a correction attached to it.

Job says it and nobody argues

Here is the line, and I want you to see how bare it is.

I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came. (Job 3:26, King James Version)

Three negatives and then a fact.

No safety. No rest. No quiet. And then trouble came anyway, which is the part that removes the last possible explanation, because he is telling us he was not even comfortable before it started.

There is no lesson in that verse. There is no turn at the end. It is a man describing the inside of his own nights, accurately, and the book keeps it.

And I want you to notice that his friends spent about thirty chapters explaining his trouble to him and God said at the end of it that they had not spoken what was right. The man who said plainly that he had no rest was the one who came out of that book approved.

You are allowed to say out loud that you have no rest, and describing your own nights honestly has never once been a failure of faith. The written word keeps Job's bare account of his nights and overrules the men who explained it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who preserved it that way.

So I am not going to explain the listing to you. I am going to tell you what it cannot give you.

It cannot give you the goodbye, because a photograph has no ending in it. The visit has to be ended by you, out loud, once, with somebody there. Otherwise it goes on at eleven at night forever, and it will still be going on in a year.

You have the authority to end a visit that has no ending of its own, and closing it has never once been the same as pretending you did not want it. The Spirit of God is the one who will be in the room when you do that, and Job 3 is where you can go and read that your nights were never a thing to be ashamed of.