It Does Not Feel Like Home Yet And That Scares Me

You still take your shoes off in the hall in a particular way.

That is the detail you noticed, about three weeks ago, and once you had noticed it you could not stop seeing the rest of it.

You knock, slightly, on the door of the room your daughter is in, which you never did in the old place. You put things back exactly. You have an odd small hesitation before opening the cupboard in the kitchen, as though there might be somebody else's things in it.

Four months.

And the house is lovely and you chose it and you were right to choose it and you would choose it again. That is not the problem and none of this is about the house.

You are living in it like a guest.

And the thing that has started to frighten you is not the feeling itself. It is a question that arrived at about the ten week mark and has been sitting there since, and the question is: what if this is just how it is going to be now.

Belonging arrives late and it arrives by use

Let me tell you what I have watched happen in people, because this is being measured against a timetable that does not exist.

A place does not become home by being owned and it does not become home by being decorated. It becomes home by things happening in it.

Ordinary things, mostly. A hundred evenings. An argument that got resolved in a particular doorway. A morning somebody was ill. The night the power went off and everybody ended up in one room.

Four months is very little of that. You have had one season in this house. There has been no Christmas here, no summer, no week when somebody was sick, no visitor who stayed too long.

You have had four months and not a life yet, and a house that has not become home in one season has never once been a house that is refusing to. The Holy Spirit is the one who has been in that hallway every time you took your shoes off carefully, and it is written in Psalm 16 that in thy presence is fulness of joy.

And I want to say something about the frightening question, because it is worth answering directly.

What if this is how it is going to be now.

Nothing in the record supports it. Every other place in your life became yours, and the period before it did is now impossible to remember, which is the thing that makes this so disorienting. The becoming is invisible from inside. Nobody has ever been able to name the day a house turned into home.

Which means that the absence of a signal is not evidence. You would not have had a signal in the old place either.

You have been waiting for a moment that nobody has ever once been able to identify, and the lack of a signal has never been the same as a lack of movement. Psalm 16 puts the fulness of joy in a presence rather than in a location, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been in every place you have ever lived.

In thy presence is fulness of joy

Here is the verse, and I want to handle it honestly rather than tidily.

Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore. (Psalm 16:11, King James Version)

In thy presence is fulness of joy.

The obvious use of that verse would be to tell you that God is your real home and therefore the house does not matter, and I am not doing that, because it is half true and it would not help you and you would feel patronized by it.

Here is what I think it actually gives you.

The fulness of joy is located in a presence rather than in a building. Which means the thing you are most afraid of losing, the sense of being somewhere you belong, is not held by the house and cannot be withheld by the house. The house is not currently failing to give you something it was supposed to be giving you.

You are not being denied anything by this building, and a hallway has never once been in charge of whether a woman belongs somewhere. The Holy Spirit is the one who is the presence in question, and the written word puts the fulness in a presence and not in a place.

And then the first clause, which is the one I want you to carry.

Thou wilt shew me the path of life. Shew, over time, along a path, which is a word for a route walked rather than a destination arrived at.

The psalm is comfortable with a person being partway. It does not describe a woman who has arrived and settled. It describes somebody being shown a path while they are on it.

You are partway along something rather than stuck at the start of it, and four months in a house has never once been the end of the route. Psalm 16 uses a path and a showing rather than an arrival, and the Spirit of God is the one doing the showing while you walk.