The Third One We Lost This Year

The third call came on a Wednesday, and you took it standing up in the hallway with your coat still on.

You said thank you for letting me know. You said no, honestly, it is fine. You said we knew it was a long shot, which was not true, because you had gone back for a second look and stood a long time in the doorway of the back bedroom doing arithmetic about a bunk bed.

Then you hung up and went and put the shopping away, and by the time the freezer drawer shut you had already done the thing you have been getting so good at.

You had put it away too.

Not in a drama. Nobody cried. You simply moved the wanting somewhere further back, the way you move a chair to get past it, and you have done that twice before this year and you are getting quicker each time.

And here is the part nobody around you has noticed, because it looks so much like being sensible.

You are not protecting yourself from losing a house. You have decided that the losing was caused by the wanting, and you have begun the quiet work of not wanting anything at all.

Naming the thing you actually did

Let me say back to you what happened, in order, because I think the order has gone missing.

You wanted a house. You looked at a house. Somebody else got the house. That happened three times.

Notice what is not in that list. The wanting did not cause the losing. It did not make the seller pick somebody else, and it did not put a higher offer on the table, and it was not a factor in a single one of those three rooms where a decision got made about you without you there.

You have done nothing whatsoever to bring this on yourself, and wanting a place to live has never once been the reason a stranger chose somebody else. It is written in Ecclesiastes that time and chance happen to them all, and the Holy Spirit is the one standing in a hallway with a woman who is still wearing her coat.

But the mind does not file things in order. The mind files by pain. And three times in one year, the same sequence ran: want, look, lose. So somewhere underneath the sensible part of you, a rule got written, and the rule says the wanting is the expensive bit.

That rule is why you said it was a long shot. That is why you now say we are not really looking at the moment. That is why, when your sister sent you a listing last week, you did not open it for four days and then said it was not really us.

It was really you. You have simply stopped being willing to say so out loud, because saying so out loud is what it cost last time.

You are still the same woman who stood in that doorway working out where a bunk bed would go, and three lost offers have never once made that woman foolish. Psalm 42 puts the question straight to a person rather than about them: why art thou cast down, O my soul. The Spirit of God is the one who asks it that way, to a face and not to a file.

What the psalm does not do

Here is the verse, and I want you to watch what it refuses to do.

Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him for the help of his countenance. (Psalm 42:5, King James Version)

Read it again and notice the shape.

It does not tell the man to stop being cast down. It does not explain the being cast down. It does not suggest that if he had hoped better he would not be in this state. It asks him a real question, out loud, in his own hearing, and then it tells him where to put the hope. Not whether to have it. Where to put it.

That distinction is the whole thing, and it is the opposite of what this year has taught you to do.

You have been trying to solve a wanting problem by having less want. The psalm has no such category. The psalm assumes the want is going to be there, because the man is alive and he is thirsty, and it moves the want somewhere it will not be smashed by a phone call on a Wednesday.

You were made to want, and the wanting has never once been the fault in you that needs repairing. The written word takes a disquieted soul as an ordinary condition and gives it somewhere to lean, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the leaning with you.

And I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this teaching that is cruel. The cruel version says: hope in God rather than in a house, so stop caring about the house. That is not what is on the page. The man in the psalm never stops wanting what he wants. He wants to be back at the house of God so badly he can taste it, and he says so, repeatedly, at length, without apologizing for it once.

You have permission to want a home and to be honest about wanting it, and naming a desire out loud has never once been the same as demanding it. Psalm 42 is a man saying out loud exactly how much he misses a place, and the Spirit of God saw fit to keep it in the book rather than tidy it up.