Still in the Room I Grew Up In

There is a mark on the wall above the desk where a poster was, and you took that poster down when you were nineteen, and you have now lived in this room for longer as an adult than you did as a teenager.

Four years since you finished.

The desk is the same desk. The bed is in the same place because there is only one place it goes. Your mother repainted in the second year and you both agreed the color was a good idea and neither of you said anything about what repainting a room means.

You work. That is the part people get wrong when they hear it. You have worked since three weeks after you got back. It is just that the arithmetic of the town you would have to move to does not do what it needs to do, and it has not done it for four years, and it does not appear to be about to.

Everybody else went. That is the sentence underneath everything. Not that they succeeded, exactly, but that they went, and going seems to have been available to them and not to you, and you have never worked out what the difference was.

You do not say any of this. You are cheerful at family things and you are genuinely fond of your parents and there is no drama in this house at all.

But you woke at six this morning and looked at the mark on the wall above the desk, and thought, four years.

David says the thing out loud that people usually skip

There is a couplet in Psalm 27 where David admits what he almost did.

I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living. Wait on the LORD: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the LORD.Psalm 27:13-14

I had fainted. He does not tidy that up. He tells you he came close to going under, and he tells you what stopped it, and it was not a change in his circumstances.

And notice the phrase. Not the goodness of the Lord in some later life. In the land of the living, which means here, which means now, which means in the actual ordinary place a person is standing.

Then he says wait twice. Once as an instruction and once as an emphasis, and in between he says God will strengthen your heart, which is what a person actually needs in year four.

You are in the land of the living right now, and that is where the goodness is promised. I am not putting my own opinion over you here. Scripture says I had fainted unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living, Psalm 27:13, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that mean a kitchen in your parents' house at seven in the morning.

Nobody is going to explain the four years

I will not, and I want to be plain about why.

Nobody knows. Anybody who tells you fast is telling you what makes them comfortable, and there is a particular version of this delivered to people your age which is really about the person delivering it.

Not a season with a purpose you have to accept. Not a lesson. Not something you are being kept back from. Scripture is willing to say wait, I say, wait without supplying a reason, Psalm 27:14, and the Holy Spirit does not require you to have understood a thing before He is willing to be in the room with you.

You are not behind on a schedule God is keeping. There is no such schedule and there never was.

The mark on the wall

Here is what four years in this room has actually done, and it is not about rent.

It has made an address into a description. You are the one who is still at home. That is how it gets said at a family thing, kindly, in passing, and it has become the first fact about you rather than the fifth.

Pull those apart, because Scripture never joined them, Psalm 147:11, and the Holy Spirit has never introduced anybody to God by their address. Where a person sleeps is a logistical fact about a housing market in a specific town in a specific decade. It is not a report on their character, their competence, or their standing with God.

You are not what your postcode says about you. Scripture says the Lord taketh pleasure in them that fear Him, in those that hope in His mercy, Psalm 147:11, and the Holy Spirit has never once assessed a woman by whose name is on the door.

And you are allowed to want it

One more thing, because the opposite error is close by.

Some people, meaning well, will tell you to be content and stop striving. Contentment is a real thing and Paul does commend it, but it is not the same as pretending you do not want your own front door.

You want your own place. That is not greed and it is not ingratitude to your parents. It is an ordinary human wanting, and God is not embarrassed by it and neither should you be.

Say it to Him plainly. Not vaguely, not apologetically. You are welcome to bring the actual want and the actual four years. Scripture says in every thing by prayer and supplication let your requests be made known unto God, Philippians 4:6, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets a person past the feeling that it is not a big enough problem to mention.