I Was Told I Would Own By Now

Your mother said it in a kitchen in nineteen seventy nine and she was not lying.

She said by the time you are forty you will be in a place of your own, love. She said it the way people said things then, as a description of how life went, because in her world it was how life went and she had watched it work for everybody she knew.

She was not making you a promise. She was telling you the weather.

And you are sixty eight and you have never owned anywhere, and you have lived in eleven places, and the one you are in now you have had for nine years and it is the longest you have ever been anywhere including the house you grew up in.

And last week your granddaughter, who is twenty six, said something at the table about how none of them will ever be able to buy, and everybody laughed, and it was a joke about her generation.

And something in you moved that you have not been able to put down since.

Because nobody has ever once said that about yours.

Yours was the one where it was supposed to work. And it did not work, for you, and there has never been a conversation anywhere about that, and you have been carrying it on your own for about thirty years in the absence of anybody noticing there was anything to carry.

A promise nobody made and everybody made

Let me name the peculiar shape of this, because it is what has made it impossible to talk about.

Nobody promised you anything. Your mother was not making an undertaking in that kitchen. There is no person you could name who said a thing they should not have said.

And the telling went on constantly, by everybody, for twenty years, that this was how it went.

That is a promise made by a whole culture and owed by nobody, and the trouble with a debt like that is that there is no one to present it to. Which is why it has never been spoken about, and why you have half decided it was never a real thing at all.

You were told something by everybody and nobody, and a promise with no one behind it has never once been less real to the woman who believed it. The Holy Spirit is the one who has been in all eleven of the places you have lived, and it is written in Genesis 12 that Abram pitched his tent and built an altar there.

And then there is the second thing, which is the reason you have never raised it.

Sixty eight years old. And somewhere in there is a rule that says grief has a statute of limitations, and that a woman of that age who is still sad about a thing that was supposed to have happened by forty is a woman who has not accepted her life.

So you have kept quiet for thirty years, and the silence has been filed as acceptance.

You have been silent about something for thirty years and have called that acceptance, and no amount of time passing has ever once been the same as a loss being dealt with. Genesis 12 records exactly where a man pitched his tent and does not treat it as a stage he was passing through, and the Spirit of God is the one who thought the location of a tent worth writing down.

He pitched his tent, and built an altar

Here is the verse, and I want to look at the two things he did in it.

And he removed from thence unto a mountain on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, having Bethel on the west, and Hai on the east: and there he builded an altar unto the Lord, and called upon the name of the Lord. (Genesis 12:8, King James Version)

He pitched his tent. And there he built an altar.

Notice how much detail the text gives about a temporary structure. Which mountain. Which town to the west, which to the east. The whole geography of a place a man was going to leave.

And notice what he built there. Not a house. An altar, which is the permanent thing in that sentence, and the only permanent thing in it.

You have been in eleven places, and not one of them has ever once been outside the record of where you actually lived. The Holy Spirit is the one who kept the detail in, and the written word gives the exact position of a tent and calls the altar the thing that got built.

And I want to say something about Abram that is not usually said in this connection.

He was seventy five when he left home. He was promised land, by God, directly, in words, and he never owned any of it. The only piece of ground he ever bought in that whole country was a field with a cave in it, and he bought it to bury his wife.

He died in tents. The man the whole promise was made to.

You are in company that includes the man the promise was actually made to, and dying in a tent has never once been counted in scripture as a life that did not arrive. Genesis 12 records the altars rather than the houses, and the Spirit of God is the one who chose which to write down.