We Know The Date We Have To Leave

There is a date and everybody in the house knows it.

It is not written anywhere. Nobody put it on the calendar because putting it on the calendar would make it a thing. But every person in that house could tell you the month, and two of them could tell you the day.

And a house with a date on it behaves in a particular way, and the behavior is so gradual that nobody notices it happening.

Things stop getting done. Not the necessary things. The other ones. The small acts that make a place a place, because what is the point of doing anything in a house you will not be in by spring.

The children stop asking for things. Not because you have said no. Because they have worked out, in the way children work things out without being told, that this is not the house where things get asked for.

And a quality of provisionality settles over everything, and everybody starts living slightly to one side of their own life.

I am not going to tell you the date does not matter. It matters. It is a real constraint and it is going to arrive.

What I am going to do is separate two things that have got welded together, and once they come apart, the months in front of you change character entirely.

Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place

There is a line in the ninetieth psalm that solves this, and it does it by moving the word dwelling.

Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations. (Psalm 90:1, King James Version)

Read it again slowly, because the grammar is doing something.

The dwelling place is not the house. The dwelling place is God. That is not a poetic flourish added at the end of a psalm about property, it is the psalm's first line and it sets everything after it.

You are a household whose dwelling place is not the building, and an address has never once been what a family was actually living in. Psalm 90:1 puts the dwelling in God rather than in any structure, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says so in a kitchen with a date in it.

Now look at the phrase in all generations, because that is the part that speaks to a date.

Generations. Plural. Across the whole run of a family, over centuries, through every move any of them ever made. Whatever God is being to that family, He is being it continuously, across every address they will ever have.

Which means the thing your household is actually living in has no end date, and has never had one, and will not acquire one in the spring.

You have a dwelling that no date can be put on, and a lease has never once had any power over where a family actually lives. The Spirit of God is the one who has been a dwelling place in all generations, and it is written in Psalm 90:1 that this has been true across every generation there has been.

The two things that got welded

Now the practical separation, and I want to be concrete.

Two things got welded together and they are not the same thing.

The first is: we are leaving in the spring. That is true, and it is fixed, and nothing anybody does changes it.

The second is: therefore the months before the spring are a waiting room. That is not true, and it was never stated by anybody, and it arrived silently attached to the first one.

You are able to take a fact and detach a conclusion from it, and a fixed departure has never once made the time before it into a corridor. The Holy Spirit is the one who separates a fact from what got welded to it, and Psalm 90:1 puts the dwelling somewhere no date can reach.

And here is why the second one matters more than it looks.

Your children are not going to remember this house. They will remember this stretch of months. And what they will remember about it is not the address, it is whether their family was living or waiting during it.

That is not a small difference. It is the difference between a period a person looks back on as a time when things were hard, and a period a person looks back on as a gap.

You are able to hand a household a stretch of months that counted, and a hard season has never once had to become a gap in anybody's life. The Spirit of God is the one who is a dwelling place across every generation of a family, and it is written in Psalm 90:1 that this is what has always been true.

And this, plainly, in these words. That house is not a report on you. Not on your provision, not on your work, not on what you have been able to hold together. A place with an end date on it is not a verdict on the man in it, and I am not going to allow it to be read that way while he is standing in his own kitchen looking at a calendar he never wrote on.

You are a man whose worth was settled a long way from a lease, and where a family is living has never once been a statement about the one providing for them. Psalm 90:1 puts the dwelling in God in Psalm 90, and the same Spirit who inspired that line is in the kitchen with you.

One thing, where everybody sees it

So here is the assignment.

Put one thing that belongs to your family where everybody will see it every morning, and leave it there until the day you go.

One thing that is about the family rather than about the house. A photograph. Something a child made. A thing from the last place, or the place before that.

Put it where the morning happens. On the counter, on the shelf by the door, on the table. Somewhere every person in that household will pass it before eight.

Standing on a surface. Nothing on a wall, nothing that marks anything, nothing that could ever be an issue when you leave.

You are putting your own household in front of your own household every morning, and one object standing on a counter has never once needed anybody's permission. The Holy Spirit is the one at work in what a family sees before eight in the morning, and Psalm 90:1 makes the dwelling place something no address can hold.

Then the second half, and it is the whole point.

Leave it there until the day you go.

Not until it feels settled. Not until the situation improves. Until the actual day, and then it goes in the car with you and it goes out on the first morning in the next place.

Because a thing that stays until the last day is a thing that says these months were lived in, and a thing that comes out early says they were survived.

You are making a stretch of months into something that was lived in, and one object left in place has never once been too small a way to say so. The Spirit of God is the one who has been a dwelling in all generations, and it is written in Psalm 90:1 that this has held across every move any family ever made.