I Kept It And The House Still Works

You kept a box last month and you have been slightly uneasy ever since.

It is a perfectly ordinary box. It went on the shelf in the back room where there was already space for it, and nobody noticed and nothing happened.

And some part of you has been watching yourself since, the way you would watch a tooth you are not sure about.

Here is the sentence underneath it, and I think if you said it out loud it would surprise you with how dramatic it is.

Something in you believes that keeping one more thing is the first step of something. That there is a line somewhere, and you might be near it, and the box was possibly across it.

Nobody told you that in so many words. It arrived over years, out of programs and headlines and a general atmosphere, and it has installed a quiet monitor in your own house that watches you make ordinary decisions and files them as symptoms.

So let me do something useful with that, because the fear is costing you and the box is costing you nothing.

Look at what actually happened after you kept it. The house functioned. Dinner happened. The shelf held. Everything in your life continued exactly as it had, and the only thing that changed was that you started watching yourself.

She is not afraid of the snow

There is a line in Proverbs 31 about a woman who is not worried about winter.

She is not afraid of the snow for her household: for all her household are clothed with scarlet. (Proverbs 31:21, King James Version)

She is not afraid of the snow. That is a statement about her inner weather, and the reason given is entirely practical: the household is covered.

The confidence is not optimism. It comes from an actual state of affairs, which she can see, in her own house, with her own eyes.

You have a household that is functioning, and the working of it has never once been in question. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a woman watching herself over an ordinary box, and Proverbs 31:21 grounds a woman's confidence in what is actually true of her own house.

Now hold that up against the monitor in your back room.

The monitor is not looking at what is actually true of your house. It is looking for early signs of something that has not happened, which means it cannot ever be reassured, because an absence of evidence is exactly what an early stage looks like.

You are being watched by something that no amount of ordinary life can satisfy, and it has never once been reading your actual house. The written word bases its confidence on the visible state of a household, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a woman who has kept one box and been uneasy for a month.

Reading the actual house

So let us do what the verse does, and read the house that is actually there.

Everybody in it is fed. The bills are paid or they are being handled. People can sit down in the rooms they need to sit down in and sleep in the beds. Things are findable.

That is not a house in trouble. That is a house working, with a box on a shelf in it, which is what a working house looks like.

You are living in a house that is doing its job, and one box on a shelf has never once changed that. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a woman doing an honest survey of her own rooms for the first time in a while, and Proverbs 31:21 looks at the household and draws its confidence from what is there.

And here is the honest thing about the line you are afraid of.

If there were a real one, it would not be crossed by a box. It would be crossed by rooms that stopped working, doors that stopped opening, a family that could not use its own house. Those are visible, ordinary, obvious things, and not one of them is happening.

You have real markers available to you and have never once needed to guess, and none of them has moved. The written word points at a covered household as the evidence, and the Spirit of God is the one who steadies a woman who has been checking herself for symptoms of nothing.

Saying it with the box on the shelf

So tonight, one object and one sentence, and the box stays exactly where it is.

Pick up one thing you kept. Say out loud why you kept it, and then say that the house still works.

You are naming both halves out loud, and the second half has never once been less true than the first. The Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman standing at a dresser drawer at dusk, and Proverbs 31:21 puts the confidence and the reason for it in one sentence.

Here is why the second half.

The monitor only ever gets one side of the ledger. It sees the keeping and never the functioning, because nobody says the functioning out loud, because a working house is not news.

Say it out loud once and the ledger has both columns in it for the first time in years.

You are putting the other column into the room, and it has never once been an exaggeration to say your house works. The written word states the covering as plainly as the confidence, and the Spirit of God is the one present with a woman saying something ordinary and true in her own kitchen.