Every Box Has A Person In It

Somebody asked you about the garage last month and you said it was mostly junk.

That was not true and you knew it was not true while you were saying it.

There are eleven boxes out there. You could tell me, without opening one of them, roughly what is in each, and more than that you could tell me who each one belongs to.

That one is your uncle. That one is the house on the corner where your grandmother lived and the smell of the hallway. That one is a friend from twenty five years ago who is not in touch and is not dead and is simply gone.

They are not boxes of things. They are boxes of people, and you have never said that sentence out loud to anybody because of how it would sound.

So instead you say it is mostly junk, and people nod, and the conversation moves on, and something in you takes another small step back.

Here is what I want to do today. Not the garage. I have no interest in the garage.

I want you to say the true sentence out loud, once, to somebody or to nobody, and I want to show you that scripture has a whole practice built around exactly what you have been doing quietly in a garage for twenty years.

What mean these stones

There is an instruction in Joshua that is entirely about objects and memory, and it is given by God.

That this may be a sign among you, that when your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean these stones? (Joshua 4:6, King James Version)

Twelve stones, carried up out of a riverbed, set down in a heap so that somebody walking past would ask about them.

The whole design of that pile is that it prompts a question. The stones are useless. They hold nothing, they do nothing, and God tells them to keep them anyway, because an object in a place is how a story survives the people who were there.

You have been running a practice God Himself instituted, and an object kept to hold a person has never once been junk. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a man who can name eleven boxes without opening one, and Joshua 4:6 sets up stones for the sole purpose of being asked about.

Now look at what the stones are for, precisely.

They are for being asked about. The value is not in the stones sitting there quietly for forty years. The value arrives when somebody says what are these, and a man gets to answer.

You are sitting on eleven answers that nobody has ever been given the chance to ask for, and the silence has never once been the point of keeping them. The written word designs a kept pile around a question and an answer, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a man who said it was mostly junk and knew better.

Why the word junk comes out

Here is what is happening in that moment, and it is not dishonesty.

The true sentence sounds like too much. If you said that box is my uncle, in a normal conversation on a normal Tuesday, you would have to watch the other person's face do something, and you would rather not.

So junk is the word that closes the subject without a cost. It has worked a hundred times. It costs you only a little each time, and the little is where the problem is.

You were protecting a real thing with a small untrue word, and that has never once been a fault in you. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present with a man who has closed the same conversation a hundred times, and Joshua 4:6 expects a man to be asked and to answer.

But here is the compounding cost, and it is the reason this is worth an article.

Each time you call them junk, you file them a little more as junk yourself. After twenty years of that, a man can walk into his own garage and feel vaguely guilty about eleven boxes he could name every single person in.

You have been agreeing out loud with a word that was never true, and the agreeing has never once made it true. The written word treats kept objects as a sign to be explained, and the Spirit of God is the one who steadies a man standing in his own garage feeling something he cannot justify.

Saying whose it was

So the assignment is one sentence and one object, and the sentence has a name in it.

Go and pick up one thing you kept. Say out loud whose it was and why you kept it.

Not the box. One thing out of it, or one thing from anywhere in the house. The scale here is a wristwatch and not a garage.

You are able to name one person out loud over one object, and that has never once been sentimentality. The Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man holding a watch in a quiet room, and Joshua 4:6 exists so that somebody can answer a question about a heap of stones.

And if there is somebody to say it to, say it to them.

That is the version of this that does the most, because Joshua's stones were never meant to be explained to an empty field. But an empty room counts. The sentence existing outside your head is the whole of it.

You are giving an answer that has been waiting twenty years for a question, and it has never once needed the right listener to be worth saying. The written word builds the whole practice around an object and an answer, and the Spirit of God is the one present with a man saying a name out loud for the first time in years.