It Was Fine And Then It Was Not

Your house used to be fine.

That is the part that gets left out when you talk about it, mostly because you do not talk about it. But it is true and you know exactly how true. There was a version of this house that worked. You had people round. You knew where things were. It was not a showroom and it did not need to be, it was just a house that functioned, and you lived in it without thinking about it.

And then there was a stretch.

I do not know what it was. It might have been a death. It might have been a diagnosis, yours or somebody else's. It might have been a job that took everything and gave nothing back, or a marriage ending, or a birth that was harder than anyone told you, or a year where you were simply frightened for months on end. I do not know, and I am not going to guess at you.

But I know the shape of it, because the shape is in the house.

Something happened, and while it was happening you did what a person does, which is spend everything you had on getting through the day. And the house is where the shortfall went. Not because you stopped caring. Because there was nothing left over, and a house is the thing that runs on left over.

Here is what I want to put down in front of you, and I want it to be the first thing you have heard said this plainly. The house did not slide because you are lazy. Something hard happened to you, and this is part of what it cost you.

Have mercy upon me, for I am in trouble

There is a psalm that puts a body and a life in the same sentence, and it does not apologize for it.

Have mercy upon me, O LORD, for I am in trouble: mine eye is consumed with grief, yea, my soul and my belly. (Psalm 31:9, King James Version)

Mine eye is consumed with grief, yea, my soul and my belly.

Look at what he does there. He is talking about grief, and he does not keep it in his feelings where it would be tidy. He puts it in his eye. He puts it in his stomach. He says the trouble went into his body and took something out of it.

That is not poetry decorating a sad mood. That is a man reporting accurately. Hard things take a physical toll, and he says so out loud, in the middle of a prayer, without treating it as a weakness he needs to explain.

And nobody in this psalm tells him to get a grip. Nobody suggests he would be less consumed if he had more faith. He says what it cost and he says it to God.

You are permitted to say what it cost you, and heaven has never once required you to keep the toll out of the telling. Psalm 31:9 puts the grief in his eye and his belly with no apology attached, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person report the damage honestly instead of minimizing it.

The house is a record, not a verdict

Now here is what I actually want you to see, and I think it changes what you are looking at when you look around this room.

You have been reading your house as a verdict on your character. Look at it. Look at what kind of person lives like this.

It is not a verdict. It is a record.

It is a record of a stretch of time when everything you had was going somewhere else. Every pile in here has a date on it. Not a moral, a date. That corner is from the six weeks you were at the hospital. That room is from the winter you were not sleeping. That is not what you are like. That is what happened to you, written down in objects because you were too busy surviving to file it anywhere else.

And I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this that turns into an excuse and that is not what I am doing. I am not telling you the house does not matter or that it will sort itself. I am telling you that you have been reading the wrong thing off it, and you have been sentencing yourself with evidence that was never evidence.

You are looking at a record of a hard season, and it has never once been a description of your character. The written word says the trouble consumed his eye and his belly and calls that trouble rather than failure, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a person read their own house as history instead of a verdict.

Write down the month

So here is the thing I want you to do, and it is not cleaning and it is deliberately not cleaning.

Write down the month it started.

Not the year. The month, as close as you can get it. Then, beside it, write what was going on then. One line. Not an essay and not a defense of yourself, just the fact of it. March, my mother went into hospital. October, the job. February, the second time.

That is the whole task. A month and a line.

Psalm 31:9 names the trouble and puts the cost of it in the same sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a plain line on paper land differently than the same sentence rehearsed in your head at two in the morning.

You are able to name what happened to you, and naming it has never once been the same as making an excuse. Psalm 31:9 says have mercy upon me for I am in trouble and states the trouble as real, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present when a person writes the true date down.