Houses For Other People

Neal has framed houses for thirty one years and he can tell you what a place is going to feel like before it has a single sheet of plywood on it.

He is good at it in a way that nobody sees, because everything he does gets covered up by somebody else's work. Drywall goes over it. Then paint. Then a family. Nobody in a finished house has ever once said the word framing out loud.

It is quarter past six on a Thursday in June and the crew is packing up. The frame is standing, the roof is on, the windows are holes with paper taped over them, and the whole thing smells the way a house smells at exactly this stage, which is sawdust and hot pine and a little bit of the tar off the felt.

The owners come by at the end of the day. They almost always do, at this stage. It is the stage where a house first looks like the thing it is going to be, and people cannot stay away from it.

They are maybe thirty five, both of them, with a boy running the joists like a balance beam and getting told to get down for the fourth time.

And the wife walks into the framed rectangle where the dining room is going to be, and stops, and puts her arms out to about the width of a table, and says: here. It goes here. Right here, and then we can see the yard.

Neal is coiling an extension cord about fifteen feet away.

And what goes through him is not envy exactly. It is something more specific and a lot quieter. It is that he has known where the table goes in about four hundred houses. He has stood in the studs and seen it. He could walk you through subdivisions in three counties and tell you which way the light comes in, in the mornings, in rooms he has never been inside since.

And he has never once known where the table goes in a house that was his.

He rents the bottom half of a duplex on Fourth Street. Has for nineteen years. It is fine. The radiator knocks and the landlord is decent and he cannot paint the front door, which is beige, and which he would paint dark green.

You know this feeling from your own version of it.

You have built things other people are living in. You have raised children who live somewhere else now, or carried a department that got the credit, or held a family together that nobody has ever thanked you for holding, or done thirty years of the kind of work that gets covered over by somebody else's finish. And when a church starts talking about a good future, some part of you goes flat, because the future has been described to you before and none of it has ever shown up at your address. You are expected at something real, and the expecting is not a hope you are working up but a fact somebody else has settled. That is what Scripture actually promises, in a chapter that says it in the plural, and it is the Holy Spirit who is given as the down payment on it, which is a word for money already handed over.

The promise is in the plural and it is not about your lease

Let me put the site's whole subject into plain words before we get to the verse, because it decides how big the promise is.

When Scripture calls anybody the bride, it means the church: a whole people, corporate and plural, a company rather than a person. It belongs with the words household, body, city, nation and flock. It has never described a private romance between Christ and one reader, and if that framing ever made you uneasy, keep the instinct. What follows is about a whole people at a table in a world God is making, and you being in that people is the entire mechanism of it.

Now the verse, and read the pronoun.

And they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them.Isaiah 65:21

They. Not he. Not you personally, singular, this fiscal year.

Isaiah is describing a whole restored people in a world God is making new, and he says it the way a man describes a village he can see from a hill: houses with the people who built them living in them, vineyards with the planters eating the grapes. The next verse says it from the other side, that they will not build and have another live in it, which is the exact wound Neal has been carrying up ladders for thirty one years without ever giving it a name.

You are inside the people that promise was made about, and the promise is not a forecast about your address. That is written into the plural of the sentence itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a whole company able to expect a thing that is not here yet without lying to itself about what is.

I want to be exact with you, because this category is where writers get careless.

I am not telling you that God is about to give you a house. I do not know that and neither does anybody else, and a man who promises you that on Isaiah's authority has taken a promise about a restored world and shrunk it into a prediction about real estate. What I am telling you is that the thing ahead is real, it is corporate, it has a table in it, and you are expected there.

You have an inheritance that is being kept for you, and the keeping was never handed to you as a job. His word says it is incorruptible and undefiled and reserved in heaven, reserved being a word about something held under somebody else's care, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named the earnest of that inheritance while a man is still coiling a cord at the end of a shift.

What it means to be expected

Here is the difference between a wish and an expectation, and it is the whole of this article.

A wish is something you generate. You have to keep it going yourself, and it costs you every time, and it gets more expensive the older you get, which is why people quietly stop having them somewhere in their fifties and call it being realistic.

An expectation is not generated by the person doing the expecting. It rests on somebody else having said something. A man expected at a table is not doing any work at all. Somebody else laid the place.

You have a place at that table, and it was set by the one who is hosting rather than claimed by you. His word says in my Father's house are many mansions, and that He went to prepare a place, prepare being His verb and place being a noun with edges on it, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the guarantee of the inheritance, which is legal language about something already secured.

And notice what that does to the shape of a life like Neal's.

If the good thing ahead were a wish, then thirty one years of framing other people's dining rooms is thirty one years of evidence against him, and the honest reading of his life is that it did not work out. If the good thing ahead is a table somebody else has already set, then his thirty one years are not evidence about anything. They are just what he did. And what he did, incidentally, is put four hundred families under a roof, which is not nothing in a world where God notices a cup of cold water.

You are not being read as a result, and nobody is grading your life by what it produced. The word says a cup of cold water given in His name does not lose its reward, which is the smallest act anybody could name being remembered anyway, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that account rather than any of us keeping it on ourselves.