The House on the Pike Road

The roof went on in the second year and that was the last thing that looked like progress from the road.

Everything since has been inside. Joists. Wiring. A chimney breast that turned out to be holding up more than anybody thought. Six years of Saturdays and most of two summers, and if you drive past on the pike road it looks exactly the way it looked in year two, which is why everybody thinks nothing has happened.

Your grandfather built the back half of it in 1931. Your father was born in the room over the kitchen. You have a photograph of four generations on those steps and you have never been able to look at it for very long.

Your brother said the word at Christmas. Sell. He said it once and then he said it properly, with the figure attached, and he was not being cruel, he was being an accountant, which is what he is.

Your wife has not said it. She has said other things, about your back, and about how many Saturdays are left in a life, and she has been careful and she has been right.

And you have been up there on your own on Sunday afternoons since February, plastering a hallway nobody has walked down in forty years, and asking yourself a question you cannot get to the bottom of, which is whether this is faith or whether it is a man who cannot put something down.

God told a man to buy property in a doomed city

There is a chapter in Jeremiah that reads like a strange joke and is not one.

And I bought the field of Hanameel my uncle's son, that was in Anathoth, and weighed him the money, even seventeen shekels of silver. And I subscribed the evidence, and sealed it, and took witnesses, and weighed him the money in the balances. Take these evidences, both the one that is sealed and the one that is open, and put them in an earthen vessel, that they may continue many days. For thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Houses and fields and vineyards shall be possessed again in this land.Jeremiah 32:9-15

The Babylonian army is outside the walls while this is happening. Jeremiah is in custody. Every sensible man in Jerusalem knows exactly what that field is worth, which is nothing.

And God tells him to buy it, weigh out the silver in front of witnesses, sign it, seal it, and put the deed in a clay jar so it will last.

Notice what God does not do. He does not promise Jeremiah will live to farm it. He gives no date. He does not say the siege will lift this year or that the prophet will see a single harvest from that ground.

You are allowed to hold something whose value nobody around you can see. I am not putting my own opinion over you. Scripture has God commanding a man to buy ground that made no sense to any accountant in the city, Jeremiah 32:15, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man carry that without needing to justify it at Christmas.

Your brother is not the enemy

Put this down before we go on: he is not against you.

He said it with a figure attached because a figure is how he says he is worried. He has watched you go up that road on Sundays for six years and he has done the arithmetic that you have deliberately not done, and it frightened him.

We are not making him an opponent. There is a version of this page that hands you something to say to him in January, and it would be satisfying and it would cost you a brother. Scripture puts faithful wounds in the mouth of a friend, Proverbs 27:6, and the Holy Spirit is not asking you to win Christmas.

And your wife is right about the Saturdays. That is not a small point and I am not going to skate past it.

You have not been asked to choose between hearing them and standing here. Scripture says in the multitude of counselors there is safety, Proverbs 11:14, and the Holy Spirit is as likely to speak through an accountant at Christmas as through a verse on a sawhorse.

The part where I would tell you to sell it

Now the honest half, because a page that only encourages a man is not much use to him.

If this house is costing what your household actually needs, sell it. If your back has moved from sore to something a doctor should hear about, that is not a Sunday problem, it is a Monday one. If the money going into that hallway is money that should be somewhere else, then no verse in Scripture is going to bless it, and Jeremiah's field is not a license.

And there is a harder question under all of them. Are you holding this because God put it in your hands, or because letting it go would mean your grandfather's work ends with you?

That second one is grief, and grief is not a sin, and it is also not a foundation. If it is the second, say so out loud tonight, and let God have it.

You are not required to prove anything by breaking yourself on this. Scripture says a man provides for his own house, 1 Timothy 5:8, and the Holy Spirit does not set one obedience against another.

The part where I stand with you

And here is what I will not let stand.

Nothing has happened up there in four years is a statement about a view from a road. It is not a statement about a building.

Joists are not visible. Wiring is not visible. The chimney breast you rebuilt in the fourth year is holding up a house and cannot be seen by anybody driving past at fifty, and the fact that a thing is invisible from the pike road has never once meant it was not done.

That is true about the house, and it is truer about the six years.

You are not standing on what people can see, and you never were. Scripture says we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen, 2 Corinthians 4:18, and the Holy Spirit does not read a work off a windscreen.