The Nail I Never Put in the Wall

He could pack this flat in forty minutes and he knows it, the way other men know their own phone number.

Not a boast. A skill, like any other. He knows to do the kitchen last and the papers first. He knows that four flattened boxes live behind the wardrobe, where they have lived in every place he has ever slept, and that a roll of tape costs nothing and should always be in the house. He knows which bags carry weight and which ones split. He has moved eleven times in fourteen years and only twice of those were his own idea.

Three years in this flat now. The tenancy has been renewed twice. He knows the bin day. The woman downstairs leaves bread out for him when she has baked, and the cat from the top floor comes in through his window and sleeps on the good chair as if it holds the tenancy itself.

And the walls are bare. All of them. Not minimalist, not stylish. Bare in the way a room is bare between one tenant and the next, with four small holes above the fireplace where somebody else's pictures used to hang and a paler rectangle where a mirror was.

In the kitchen drawer, the one with the batteries and the takeaway menus and the spare keys to a door in another country, there is a packet of picture hooks. Brass. Six of them. Bought two years ago in a hardware shop on a Saturday, in a good mood, on purpose. The cardboard is still sealed.

And in the bottom of the wardrobe, inside a padded envelope, inside a plastic sleeve, there is one photograph. His brother took it from the upstairs window on the last morning: the courtyard, the low table, the lemon tree that never gave more than eight lemons a year and was loved out of all proportion to its output, his grandmother's chair with the cushion gone flat.

He looks at it about twice a year. He has never once considered putting it on a wall.

Ask him why and he will tell you something reasonable. The landlord might mind. The plaster is old. He does not want to make holes he will only have to fill.

That is not it, and somewhere under his ribs he knows it is not it.

Now let me stop calling him he.

Because you have your own bare wall, and it might not even be a wall. It might be that you have never bought a chair you actually chose, or that your winter coat has been in the same suitcase for four years, or that you have not registered with a dentist because that feels like a statement. Something in your house is still saying, provisionally. Somewhere you are living in a place you have not agreed to live in.

Put the kettle on if you want. This is not going to ask you to move anything today.

The letter told them to plant gardens

Let me start where nobody starts, which is by saying that your skill is real and it is not a sickness.

Knowing how to pack a room in forty minutes is a competence. Somewhere behind you is a season where that competence was the difference between coping and drowning, and I am not going to stand here and call it a wound. It is a trade you learned. What has happened is simply that you learned it so well that you never stopped practicing, and nobody ever came and told you the practice could stop.

So let me put something in front of you, and let me be careful about who it was written to.

There is a letter in Jeremiah 29, and it is addressed to people who had been carried a very long way from home against their will. Not to comfortable people. Not to people whose paperwork was in order and whose season had turned. To captives, in a foreign city, with no realistic prospect of going back in their lifetime.

Build houses and dwell in them; plant gardens and eat their fruit. And seek the peace of the city where I have caused you to be carried away captive, and pray to the Lord for it, for in its peace you shall have peace.Jeremiah 29:5 and 29:7

Read the address on that envelope again before you read the instruction. This is not a word to people who have arrived. You are being spoken to exactly where you are, mid-sentence in a life you did not choose, and Jeremiah 29 is the Spirit's proof of it, because the same God who let the exile stand told the exiles to plant fruit trees in it.

Notice what He does not say. He does not say hold on. He does not say keep your bags by the door because this is temporary. He does not tell them to endure Babylon with dignity until the situation improves. He tells them to build a house, which nobody builds for a short stay, and to plant a garden, which is the single most patient thing a person can do with a piece of ground, and then to eat the fruit of it, which means He expected them to still be standing there when it came.

You have permission you have never once used. That is what is written to captives, and the Holy Spirit is not asking you to feel settled before you act settled; the letter went out to people who did not feel settled at all, and it told them to get the spade out anyway.

And this is where I have to be honest with you, because the temptation in a message like this is to promise you a better season and I will not do it. Nothing here says your situation improves. The exiles were told plainly that it would be a long time, and God did not soften it, and He did not tell them the hardship was a lesson or that it had been arranged for their benefit. He said none of that. What He said was: live. Here. Now. In this.

Because dwelling was never a reward for the season improving. Jeremiah 29:7 has them praying for the peace of a city that was not theirs, and the Spirit has been pressing that same sentence into you every time you walk past the kitchen drawer with the hooks in it. You are not waiting for permission to belong somewhere. You are holding a permission slip that was signed before you were born.