We Moved And I Never Unpacked

There are boxes in your house that have been taped shut for years, and you have walked past them so many times that they have become furniture.

And when anybody asks, you say you never got round to unpacking. And that sentence, said out loud, sounds exactly like laziness, which is why you have stopped saying it.

I want to tell you what I think actually happened, because I have seen this many times and it is almost never what it looks like.

A move does not end on moving day. A move ends about six weeks later, when the last of it goes into closets and cabinets and the boxes go out. That last six weeks is the real work, and it is invisible work, and it needs a stretch of ordinary uninterrupted life to happen in.

And in your six weeks, something happened.

The job started. The baby came early. Somebody got ill. The relationship that the move was supposed to fix did not get fixed. Or the move itself was the emergency, and you had arrived in a place you had not chosen, in a hurry, from something.

The move never finished, and it never finished because it was interrupted, and nothing that got interrupted at week two ever gets a second chance at week two. A room full of boxes is a record of what those weeks turned into, and it is not a verdict on the person living among them.

When the cloud was taken up

There is a passage at the very end of Exodus that describes how a whole nation moved, and it has a detail in it that changes how a person reads their own move.

And when the cloud was taken up from over the tabernacle, the children of Israel went onward in all their journeys: But if the cloud were not taken up, then they journeyed not till the day that it was taken up. (Exodus 40:36 and 37, King James Version)

They journeyed not till the day that it was taken up.

Read what that means for the practical life of a family in that camp. Sometimes they stayed for a night. Sometimes they stayed for months. And the whole account is written without a single word of blame about the unpacking.

You are living inside a timing you never controlled, and no camp in that account was ever once criticized for how settled its tents were. The Spirit of God is the one who takes a domestic timetable out of the hands of somebody who never held it, and Exodus 40:36 moves a whole nation by a cloud and says nothing at all about the unpacking.

Nobody in that text is criticized for not being settled. Settling was not the measure. Following was the measure, and following meant that the timing of everything, including domestic life, was outside their hands.

And that is much closer to your move than the version in your head, where a competent person unpacks inside two weeks.

You are not looking at the results of laziness, and Exodus 40:36 has never once measured a people by how settled their tents were. It is written that they journeyed and stopped according to a cloud they did not control, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a domestic timetable out of the hands of a person who was never in charge of it.

You have been judging a move against a version of life that had no interruptions in it. The word describes a nation whose settling was governed by something outside them, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present in a home that is still in transit.

An unfinished move is not an unfinished person

Here is the piece I want to put in your hands.

Those boxes are a record of what the six weeks after the move turned into, and they are not a verdict on the person who packed them.

And that is a much smaller thing, and a much more accurate one, and it has the enormous advantage of being fixable in a way that a character is not.

Because if the problem is that a stretch of six weeks got taken away from you, then the answer is not to become a different person. The answer is to get some of those weeks back, in small pieces, whenever they come.

And I want to add one more thing that people rarely say. Some of those boxes were never going to be unpacked, because they belong to a life you have not lived since before the move. Those are not unpacking. Those are decisions, and they are a different job entirely, and confusing the two has kept you from doing either.

You were never a person who does not finish things, and what you have is one interrupted stretch of six weeks that never got given back. Exodus 40:36 records a people whose staying and going was set by something outside them, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates a season from a character.

So tonight is not unpacking. Tonight is naming what took the six weeks.

You are permitted to write down what interrupted your move, and writing it has never once been an excuse. It is written that they journeyed not till the day the cloud was taken up, and the Holy Spirit is the one who honors a waiting that nobody chose.

Write down the month you moved

So here is the whole of what I am asking, and it takes a pen.

Write down the month you moved.

Underneath, write down what happened in the six weeks after it. Job. Baby. Illness. Argument. Money. Whatever was true.

Then look at the two lines and see the move plainly, which is that it stopped because something stopped it.

Nothing gets unpacked tonight.

You are able to see that clearly tonight, and seeing it has never once required you to open a single box. Exodus 40:36 leaves the timing of a whole nation in a cloud, and the Spirit of God is present at a table with a pen exactly as He is in a house with everything put away.