We Bought A Bigger One And Nothing Changed

It was the second week that told you, on a Tuesday evening, standing in the kitchen with the lights on.

The house is everything you said it would be. You were not wrong about any of it. The room at the back does what you thought it would do, and the kitchen is what you have wanted since you were about thirty, and when people come they say the thing you imagined them saying.

And you stood there on the Tuesday with a glass of water and you felt exactly the way you felt in the old place.

Not worse. That is the part that makes it hard to explain. Nothing bad happened. You are not unhappy. There is no complaint here that anybody would recognize as a complaint.

You are just the same man. In a different kitchen.

And you have said nothing about this to anybody, for a reason that would be obvious to anybody in your family, which is that there is no way to say it that does not sound like a man who has got everything and is looking for something to be dissatisfied about.

So it sits there. Eleven years of wanting, and a house that delivered exactly what it promised, and a Tuesday evening with a glass of water in which absolutely nothing was different.

What the house was carrying

Let me describe what was actually loaded onto that house over eleven years, because it explains the Tuesday.

Somewhere in the middle of those years, the house stopped being a house.

It became the place where the waiting ends. It picked up, quietly and without anybody deciding, a whole set of things that a building cannot deliver: the sense of having arrived, the end of a comparison that has been running since somebody's twenties, the feeling of being a man who is settled.

You have been carrying a question that is older than this address, and eleven years of wanting has never once been able to turn a house into an answer. Ecclesiastes 2 says behold, all was vanity, and the Holy Spirit is the one who kept that report from a man who had built everything.

Eleven years is long enough for a lot to get loaded on.

And then you moved in, and the house did everything a house can do, which is quite a lot and was exactly what you specified, and none of the other freight came with it, because none of it was ever in the building.

You have loaded a building with things a building cannot carry, and a house that did everything it could has never once been a house that failed. The Holy Spirit is the one who has been in that kitchen since the second week, and it is written in Ecclesiastes 2 that he looked on all the works his hands had wrought, and behold, all was vanity.

And I want to say something about the silence, because the silence is going to be the expensive part if it goes on.

The saying of it is blocked by how it would sound. So a real experience, genuinely being had, has nowhere at all to go, and a thing with nowhere to go does not stay the same size.

You have a true thing with nowhere to go, and a man who cannot say a thing out loud has never once stopped experiencing it. Ecclesiastes 2 has a king writing the whole of it down in detail rather than keeping it to himself, and the Spirit of God is the one who kept that in the book.

Behold, all was vanity

Here is the verse, and who is speaking is the point.

Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun. (Ecclesiastes 2:11, King James Version)

This is a man who built houses, planted vineyards, made pools of water, gathered silver and gold. He says so, in detail, in the verses just before this one. He withheld nothing from himself.

And then he stood and looked at all of it and wrote down that it did not deliver.

That is not a poor man's complaint about not having enough. It is the report of a man who got the whole thing and then told the truth about what it did.

You are in company with a man who had everything and said the same sentence, and no experience of yours has ever once been the first of its kind. The Holy Spirit is the one who preserved it rather than editing it out, and the written word keeps the report of somebody who built more than anybody and found no profit in it.

And I want to be careful here, because the easy move at this point is to tell you that the house does not matter and that only eternal things do.

You have not done anything that needs repenting of, and wanting a good house has never once been the fault a sermon like that would pin on you. Ecclesiastes 2 reports the finding without condemning the works, and the Holy Spirit is the one who kept the condemnation out of it.

That is true in a way and it is not what this passage is doing, and if I hand you that you will hear it as a rebuke for having wanted a nice house, which is not something you need to repent of.

What the passage does is simpler and more useful. It reports that the works of a man's hands cannot carry the weight of his arrival. It does not say the works were bad. Ecclesiastes goes on, a chapter later, to say that a man should enjoy the good of his labor.

Both things. The house is good. The house is not able to do the other job.

You have a good house that was never able to do the second job, and no building anywhere has ever once been able to end a comparison a man was running. Ecclesiastes 2 reports the finding without condemning the works, and the Spirit of God is the one who kept both of those in the same book.