A House I Will Never Live In

The house on Pump Lane has had no roof tiles on the back half since March and a dumpster outside since April, and this afternoon it smells of wet lime and sawdust and, oddly, of oranges, because somebody brought a bag of them and left the peel on the windowsill.

Adela is on the upstairs landing scrubbing a hundred years of paint out of the corner of a window reveal with a brass brush and a great deal of patience.

She has been on this crew eleven months. There are usually six of them, sometimes nine when the college sends students. Bea runs it, with a clipboard she does not consult and a pencil behind her ear that she does. The house is going to a family who are currently living in two rooms above a takeout place three towns over, and who have four children, and who have not seen it.

It is quarter past four. The light comes up Pump Lane at this hour and gets into the back bedroom and makes the new plaster look like the inside of a peach.

The rooms have been decided. Adela knows which is which by now. The little one at the front with the sloping ceiling is for the two youngest. The one at the back with the good light is for the girl who is fourteen and, according to Bea, draws.

She finishes the reveal and comes out onto the landing, and Bea is standing at the door of the back bedroom with the pencil out of her ear, doing something to the door frame.

"Come here a minute," Bea says.

On the bare wood of the frame, about four feet up, Bea has written a name in pencil, small, in capitals. Under it, a horizontal line.

"That's the eldest boy. Nine." She hands Adela the pencil. "Do the other two. Front room."

"Why?"

"Because we mark the frames before the paint goes on." Bea says this the way people say things that are obvious to them. "Height chart. Their first one. And so when they walk in, there is already something on the wall with their name on it. Nobody should walk into an empty house."

Adela goes into the front room with the sloping ceiling.

She kneels down and writes two names in pencil on the raw wood, small, in capitals, about three feet up, and draws the line under each one, and then she stays there on her knees for a bit longer than the job requires, with her thumb on the second line.

Nobody has ever done this for her. Not once, that she knows of, in her whole life. There is no frame anywhere with her name three feet up on it.

She puts the pencil in her pocket instead of giving it back.

You have marked a lot of frames.

You are the one who gets a place ready. The room, the table, the folder, the airport run, the spare bed made up in October for a visit in December. And somewhere along the way you did the arithmetic and worked out that there is not a single room anywhere in the world that anybody is preparing for you, and rather than sit with that, you stopped letting yourself want one, which felt like maturity and was actually a small quiet loss. You are expected somewhere, and the place has already been prepared by somebody who went ahead to do it. Jesus says exactly that in John 14, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it a present fact for a person kneeling on bare boards with a pencil.

He said it to the room

Here is the first thing, and it changes the size of the sentence.

Jesus says this on the last night, at a table, to eleven men who are about to fall apart. Every "you" in it is plural. He is not leaning across to one of them and making a private arrangement. He is speaking to the whole company at once, and telling all of them together what is being got ready for all of them.

That is the church, and that is what this whole site keeps putting back where it belongs. The thing ahead is not a private destination that each person reaches on their own. It is a house with room for a people, and the people are the point, and you are inside that people rather than queuing separately outside it. You are counted in a company that a place has been prepared for, and it is already being kept for the whole of it. That is written in John 14:2, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence spoken in an upper room and stands it in a person's actual week.

In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.John 14:2

Read the middle clause slowly, because it is doing something nobody notices.

If it were not so, I would have told you.

That is Jesus putting a guard rail in the sentence against the exact thing you are afraid of. He anticipates the suspicion that this is a comfortable thing said to people who need comforting, and He heads it off in the same breath: if this were not true, He says, I would have said so. He would not have left them holding a kind idea. He would have told them.

You are not holding a wish, and what you have been handed was checked by the One who refused to leave it uncorrected. That clause is in the written word, in His own mouth, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it land as reassurance instead of information.

The difference between a wish and a preparation

Now the second thing, which is the difference Adela is kneeling in.

A wish sits in the person wishing. A preparation sits in the world, in wood and lime and pencil, and it exists whether or not the person it is for knows about it. Those two children in the two rooms above the takeout place have no idea that their names are on a door frame this afternoon. Their not knowing has changed nothing about the pencil.

Jesus does not say I hope there is room. He says I go to prepare a place. It is a construction sentence. Somebody has gone ahead, on purpose, for a reason, to do work that is finished before anybody arrives.

You have a prepared place, and it does not become real when you finally believe in it. His word says He went to prepare it, and the Holy Spirit is the deposit on it, which is Paul's own image for how the church holds what has not yet been handed over.

And there is nothing on this page about when. No timetable, no dates, no reading of the signs, no arithmetic about what year anything happens in, because none of that is ours and every attempt at it has embarrassed somebody. Nor is there any suggestion that the room above the takeout place gets better this month, or that the thing you are carrying right now lifts. You are expected at the end of this, and that is true today whether or not one single circumstance moves. John 14:2 says the place is prepared, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a person steady in an unchanged week with a settled ending.