Three Generations In One House

There are nine of you and there is one bathroom and there is a rota on the back of the door that your mother wrote out in marker.

Your parents have the back room. You and your wife have the front. The three children are in the two upstairs and the arrangement of who is with whom has changed twice this year for reasons to do with who snores.

And on Tuesday somebody at work asked where you live and you said: with my folks at the moment.

At the moment.

You have been there four years. Your father has been retired for two of them. Your youngest was born in that house and has never slept anywhere else and thinks of the back room as where you go when you want to be given something.

At the moment.

You did not decide to say that. It came out, the way it comes out every time, and then you moved the conversation on, and in the car afterward you thought about it and felt something you would not have been able to put a name to.

Here is my attempt at the name. You have been describing the richest thing in your life as a temporary inconvenience, and you have been doing it for four years, and you have been doing it to yourself as much as to anybody at work.

What the arrangement actually is

Let me describe your house from the outside, the way somebody who did not grow up here would see it.

Your children are being raised inside touching distance of their grandparents. Not visited twice a year. Downstairs. Every day, at every meal, in the ordinary traffic of a house.

Your mother sees her grandchildren grow up. Your father has somebody to talk to at eleven in the morning, which is the hour that empties out a retired man. Your wife has another woman in the kitchen. There is always somebody in the house when the school calls.

In most of the world and in most of history that is not a fallback. That is the arrangement. The thing people have been doing forever, and the thing a great many households are quietly lonely for.

You have an arrangement most of the world would recognize as normal, and a full house has never once been the shape of a life that went wrong. The Holy Spirit is the one who counted that as something God does rather than something people settle for, and it is written in Psalm 68 that God setteth the solitary in families.

And now I want to name what has actually been happening in you, because it is not about square footage.

You measure this house against one picture, and the picture is a man with his own front door, and in that picture there is nobody else in the kitchen.

That picture is about forty years old in this country and it is not in scripture anywhere, and you have been rating your life by it since you were twenty.

You have been measuring against a picture that is younger than your own parents, and no arrangement of a household has ever once been the thing that measured a man. Psalm 68 puts the setting of the solitary in families on God's side of the ledger, and the Spirit of God is the one who called that a good outcome.

He setteth the solitary in families

Here is the verse, and I want you to see the direction it runs.

God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth out those which are bound with chains: but the rebellious dwell in a dry land. (Psalm 68:6, King James Version)

God setteth the solitary in families.

That is listed as a good work of God, alongside bringing prisoners out of chains. Those two sit in the same sentence: freeing the bound, and putting the alone into households.

Read the direction. The movement in that verse is from solitary toward family, not the other way. It is not a verse about a man getting his own place at last. It is a verse about somebody who was on their own being put into a house with people in it.

You are on the good side of that sentence, and nobody in scripture has ever once been congratulated for getting a house to themselves. The Holy Spirit is the one who wrote it in that direction, and the written word lists the setting of the solitary in families among God's works.

And then the last clause, which is the part that turns this the right way up.

The rebellious dwell in a dry land. The contrast in that verse is not between the crowded house and the spacious one. It is between the household and the dry place. Between people and nobody.

You are living in the opposite of a dry land, and nine people in one house has never once been the thing that verse warns about. Psalm 68 sets the household against the dry place rather than against a bigger house, and the Spirit of God is the one who drew the contrast there.