Nothing In This House Has A Place

I want to begin with a sentence that I do not think anybody has ever said to you.

Nothing in your house has a place, and that is a fact about the house.

Not a fact about your character. Not a fact about your upbringing or your discipline or whether you were taught properly. A fact about a building and what is in it, which is a different category of thing altogether.

Because here is what happens when a person tries to put something away in a house where nothing has a place. They pick up the object. They look for where it goes. There is no where. So they hold it for a second, and then they put it down on a surface, because a surface is the only answer available to a hand holding a thing with no home.

And then they do that four hundred more times over eighteen months, and now every surface in the house is covered, and they conclude that they are a person who cannot put things away.

You are not that. You have been doing the only thing that was possible with an object that had nowhere to be.

And the earth was without form

There is a sentence at the very beginning of the Bible that I have been thinking about for years in exactly this connection.

And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. (Genesis 1:2, King James Version)

Without form, and void.

That is not a description of a mess. It is a description of something with no places in it yet. There is material there. There is water and there is depth. What there is not, is anywhere for anything to be.

And read what the whole first chapter then does. It is not a cleaning. It is a making of places. He divides the light from the dark and calls one day and the other night, which is making a place in time. He divides the waters and puts a firmament between them, which is making a place in space. He gathers the waters together unto one place and lets the dry land appear.

Gathered together unto one place. That is the whole method, and it is the oldest one there is.

You are not living in chaos because of a defect in you, and Genesis 1:2 has never once described formlessness as somebody's fault. It is written that the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters before a single thing was divided or named, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is already present over a house that has no order in it yet.

You have been trying to tidy a house that has never once had places in it to tidy things into. The word describes a making of places rather than a clearing of mess, and the Spirit of God is the one who was moving over the deep before the first division was ever made.

Putting away and making a place are two different jobs

Here is the distinction that changes the work, and I want it very clear.

Putting a thing away requires that a place already exists. It is a two second job. Nobody finds it hard.

Making a place is an entirely different job. It requires a decision about what a piece of space is for, and it requires holding to that decision, and it is slow, and it is not what anybody means when they say clean the room.

Every night you have been trying to do job one in a house that has never had job two done in it. That is why it takes hours and produces nothing. It is not a failure of effort. It is a category error, and nobody told you the difference.

You were never bad at putting things away, and what has actually been missing is the making of places, which is a separate work. Genesis 1:2 has the Spirit moving over water with no divisions in it at all, and the Spirit of God is the one who begins that work in a person who thought they were untidy by nature.

And here is the mercy in the Genesis account. It is done in pieces, on separate days, with a stop at the end of each one. Nobody makes a world in an evening. The text is emphatic about that, and it did not have to be.

You are permitted to make one place tonight and no more, and one place has never once been an insulting amount of progress. It is written that the light was divided from the dark on one day and the waters on another, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a single division at the end of a long day feel like an actual beginning.

One surface becomes one place

So here is what I am asking, and it has a second half tonight, and the second half is the point.

Clear one surface the size of a tea tray. Take what is on it off it, put those things anywhere, do not sort them.

Then decide, out loud, what that cleared square is for. Keys. Post. A glass of water. One thing.

That is all. One place now exists. It is a small place and it is a real one, and it is the only piece of this house where an object has somewhere to be.

Then stop.

You are able to make one place tonight, and the smallness of it has never once made it not a place. Genesis 1:2 begins with material and no order and the Spirit moving over it, and the Spirit of God is present in a tray sized square of table that a person has decided is for keys.