Nineteen Addresses

The kitchen in the new place has a window over the sink, which is the first thing he liked about it, and a drawer that sticks, which is the second thing he stopped noticing.

Nineteen addresses. He counted them once on the back of a moving receipt, in order, and got to nineteen and did not do that again. Some of them were good moves. A better job in Ohio. A better apartment when the last one flooded. Two of them were not moves so much as leavings. One of them he still cannot say out loud in a normal voice.

He is fast now. He can pack a kitchen in ninety minutes. He knows to keep the shower curtain and one towel out of the truck, and which box the coffee maker goes in, and he labels in marker on two sides because tape peels.

And in the corner of the spare room there are four boxes he has not opened.

They are from three houses back. He knows what is in them the way you know what is in a room you grew up in. Books. Photographs in a shoebox. A wooden bowl somebody made. He does not open them because opening them is not the work. Unpacking them is the work, and unpacking them means putting things on shelves, and putting things on shelves means being a person who lives somewhere, and he has learned what it costs to become that person and then load a truck.

Tonight he is putting groceries away and he cannot find the can opener.

He knows exactly where it is. Second box from the wall, the one that says KITCHEN MISC 2 in his own handwriting from a summer he would rather not revisit. He stands in front of it with a bag of groceries on his hip and has an entire argument with himself about a can of beans.

Then he cuts the tape.

On top, wrapped in a dish towel he does not remember owning, are the plates. Eight of them, the good ones, cream with a thin blue line around the rim, and he has been eating off the same two for six years.

He takes one out and sets it on the counter, and it makes a small flat sound on the laminate, and he stands there in a rented kitchen in a town he has been in for five weeks, holding a dish towel, looking at one plate.

You know that corner of the spare room. It might not be boxes for you: it might be a wall you never hung anything on, a church you attend without joining, a friendship you keep at a length you can survive losing. Somewhere along the line you learned not to unpack, and it was sensible, and it has cost you more than it saved. Hear this before we go any further. You are expected somewhere, and the place is not provisional and not a rental. That is not a wish. It is what the written word says God has done, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts an expectation like that into a man who has stopped forming them.

They were not homesick for a house

Let me say the plain thing first, because everything here rests on it.

The bride in Scripture is the church. A whole people, gathered across every century and every town, promised to Christ together and brought home together. It is never one person and it is never a private romance. So the feast at the end of the story is not a wedding photograph and it is not a scene about you alone. It is a table with a company around it, and the significance of that for a man who has moved nineteen times is enormous: a table set for a people is not a seat that gets given away when somebody does not show up on time.

You are inside the company that whole story is about, and you were counted into it long before the first of those nineteen addresses. Scripture keeps this promise in the plural on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man who has never belonged anywhere for long hear a plural and put himself inside it.

Hebrews eleven is a long list of people who lived out of boxes. It says of them that they confessed they were strangers and exiles on the earth, that they were looking for a country of their own, and that if they had been thinking of the one they left they could have gone back. They did not go back. And then comes the line that this whole page is standing on:

But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.Hebrews 11:16

He has prepared. Past tense, already, done. Not a plan He intends to draw up, not a place that comes into being if enough people want it badly enough. Prepared. You have a city that God has already built, and it is finished, and it is not waiting on you to earn an address in it. The written word puts that verb in the past tense on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a past tense verb land in the chest of a man who has stopped believing in permanent things.

Not ashamed to be called their God

Now look at the strange middle clause, because it is the one that does the pastoral work.

Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God. That is an odd thing to say about the Almighty, and it is deliberate. It means somebody could have been ashamed. These were not impressive people. They were nomads with no fixed address, people who died without receiving what was promised, people whose lives from the outside looked like a series of temporary arrangements that never resolved into anything.

And God attaches His name to them anyway. He lets Himself be introduced by their names. And then Scripture tells you the reason, and the reason is not their record. It is a construction project. He is not ashamed of them because He has built them a city, and a builder is not embarrassed by the people He built it for.

You are one of the people that city was built for, and God has already put His name beside yours. That is the written word's own logic and not a warm gloss on it, and the same Spirit who moved a man to write that sentence is the one making sure it reaches somebody in a rented kitchen.

And that answers the thing the four boxes are actually about. The story you have been telling yourself about being a person nothing holds on to has no right to stay, because Scripture already told a different one. His word says God prepared a city for exactly this kind of person, and His Spirit is not in the business of confirming a verdict God never signed.