The Picture Against the Skirting Board

Eleven years in this house and there is not one hook in any wall of it.

The painting his daughter did at fourteen, the harbor with the two boats and the sky she was so pleased with, has been leaning against the skirting board in the hall for four of those years. Framed. Ready. Turned slightly so the light does not sit on the glass. Every visitor asks about it and he says the same thing, that he keeps meaning to get round to it, and every visitor believes him, because it is the kind of thing people genuinely do keep meaning to get round to.

It is not that. He knows it is not that, in the way a person knows a thing at the back of the head without ever bringing it forward. It is that a hook makes a hole, and a hole is a mark you leave, and a mark you leave assumes you were entitled to leave one. Somewhere behind everything he has ever done in this house there is a sentence waiting to be said to him, in a reasonable and even apologetic voice, that the arrangement has come to an end and would he mind.

You know this house. Maybe yours has a chair you sit on rather than a chair that is yours. Maybe you have kept the box the kettle came in. Maybe you live extremely well out of two shelves and a drawer, and you have got so good at it that nobody in your life has ever noticed you doing it, and you would struggle to say when it started or who told you.

Provisional is a way of living, not a lease

There is a way of occupying a place that keeps one hand on the door. It looks like tidiness. It looks like being easy to have around. Underneath it is a calculation, run so often that it has stopped feeling like a calculation: never own more of this than you could carry out in one trip.

People do it in houses and they do it in churches and they do it, most quietly of all, with God. Years of service, real service, and never once an afternoon spent doing nothing in His house. Every prayer with a purpose in it. Every arrival with a reason attached, the way you would ring ahead before calling on somebody who was busy. Not because anybody said so. Because a guest with any manners does not put a hook in another man's plaster.

Now hear how Paul settles it, and notice that he does not settle it with a feeling.

So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.Ephesians 2:19

That is a position, not a mood. Strangers, aliens, citizens, members: these are words about where a person stands in a household, and Paul uses them the way a surveyor uses words, to fix something. The Spirit of God does not wait for you to feel fixed before the fixing holds.

You have the standing of a member in the house of God, right now, and it is not upgraded by a good week or downgraded by a poor one. I am not offering you my impression of your situation. That is the written sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old line about citizenship land as a fact about the hallway you are standing in tonight. Nothing about it depends on you feeling settled first.

The one who settles the solitary

There is a line in the psalms with a builder's verb in it. God settles the solitary in a home. Settles. It is what you do to a foundation and it is what you do to a person, and in both cases it means the movement is finished and the thing has come to rest on something that will take it.

The word matters, because there is a kind of belonging that is real and still feels temporary, and a reader can spend a long time waiting for the feeling to arrive before they will act as though the fact is true. It works the other way round. He settled you. The hook goes in after that, not before, and the hook is not what makes it true.

You have been settled here by God Himself, and settling was His act and not your achievement. That is what the psalm says He does, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes an ancient line about the lonely and makes it plain to a man in a hallway with a painting leaning on his skirting board. It is His house, and He is the one who moved you in.

Let me be careful here, because there is a bad turn available at exactly this point. None of this makes what you do with the house irrelevant. Paul goes straight on, and it is written into the very same passage: the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple, and you are being built into it as a dwelling place for God by His Spirit. That is not a lodger's language and it is not a license either. A member of the household is the one who mends the gutter and knows where the stopcock is. Permanence does not make you careless. It is the only thing that ever made anybody take proper care.