Nobody Told Us What It Costs Once You Are In

The third one came on Tuesday and you laughed, which surprised you.

Not a good laugh. The other kind, the one that arrives when a thing has become so relentless that it stops being upsetting and starts being almost funny, and you stood in the kitchen with the envelope and made a sound and your partner came in and asked what.

Three unexpected costs in one month. All of them legitimate. None of them anything anybody warned you about.

And what you have been feeling, underneath the arithmetic, is not really about money. It is a specific and quiet humiliation, and it goes something like: everybody else seems to have known.

I want to go straight at that, because it is wrong, and it is the actual injury here.

Nobody told you because nobody tells anybody.

That is not a conspiracy. It is a series of ordinary human reasons stacked on top of each other, and once you see them the humiliation loses its grip.

People who own houses do not talk about the running costs, because it sounds like complaining about a thing they are lucky to have. People who have just bought are embarrassed for exactly the reason you are, and so they say nothing. People who bought a long time ago genuinely cannot remember, because they absorbed those costs gradually over twenty years and they have become invisible household weather.

And everybody involved in selling you the house had no reason at all to itemize what it would cost to keep it.

So there is no register anywhere of what a house actually takes, and every single owner has found out the same way you are finding out, and none of them told the next one.

You are not behind. You are simply in the year when everybody learns it.

Not knowing is the ordinary human condition

Let me take the humiliation apart properly, because it is built on an assumption nobody ever checks.

The assumption is that there was a body of knowledge available, that responsible people acquired it, and that you failed to.

There was no such body of knowledge. There is no book. There is no list. There is no meeting that everybody else attended.

You have been treating a thing nobody knew as a thing you failed to learn, and an unwritten register has never once been a test you could have studied for. The Holy Spirit is the one who put that in the book as a description and not as a reproach, and it is written in James 4 that ye know not what shall be on the morrow.

And there is a second layer to it, which is worth naming because it will keep coming back for the next few years.

You have probably gone looking for the register. Most new owners do, at about month four. And what you find is people with a strong opinion about a method, which is not the same thing, because a method assumes you already know what is coming.

You are missing information rather than character, and a person who was never told has never once been a person who was careless. James 4 says plainly that nobody knows what tomorrow holds, and the Spirit of God is the one who kept that sentence general rather than aiming it at the foolish.

Ye know not what shall be on the morrow

Here is the verse, and I want you to notice who it is addressed to.

Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. (James 4:14, King James Version)

Ye know not.

Not the careless know not. Not those who failed to prepare know not. Ye. All of you. The whole room, including the ones who seem to have it worked out, including the man who told you about his kitchen, including the person who sold you the house.

That is scripture stating, as a general fact about being a human being, that the information you have been punishing yourself for lacking is information no one has.

You have never once had access to tomorrow, and no owner anywhere on this street has ever had it either. The Holy Spirit is the one who levels that ground rather than leaving you standing below it, and the written word puts every single person in the same position on the morrow.

And look at how James goes on, because it is not a rebuke. He is talking to people making confident plans about next year, and what he asks them to do is add one clause: if the Lord will.

He does not tell them to stop planning. He tells them to stop speaking as though the next twelve months were already in their hands.

You are standing exactly where James puts everybody, and holding a plan loosely has never once been the same as having no plan. James 4 asks for one clause and not for a change of character, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that clause a relief rather than a threat.