Building On Ground That Is Not Ours

There is nobody of his buried within sixty miles of here.

That is the sentence he has never said out loud and it is the whole of the thing. Every tree on this land was put in by a man he will never meet. Every stone in that wall was set by somebody else's hands, in a year he could not name, for reasons nobody remembers.

The move was not a choice. It does not matter here what it was, and it was not anybody's fault, and there was no version where they stayed.

Two years now.

And he has not put one permanent thing into this ground.

Everything they own here could be lifted in a morning. The furniture is the furniture that travels. Nothing has been dug. Nothing has been fixed to a wall that could not be unfixed in ten minutes. He has not so much as put a hook up in a place that would leave a mark.

He is still, in every way that matters, living out of the truck.

Here is what happened three weeks ago.

His daughter asked whether they could plant the tree they brought with them. It has been in a pot for two years and it is not well and everybody knows it is not well.

He said, we will see where we end up.

And she said, Papa, we have ended up.

She is fourteen and she was not being rude and she was not making a point. She said it the way you say a thing that is simply true and that you assumed everybody had noticed.

He has thought about that sentence every day since.

If you are standing on ground that is not yours, come and take one of these chairs. Nobody out here is going to ask you how long you are staying.

What God told people in a city they were carried to

There is a letter written to people who had been taken somewhere against their will, and the instruction in it is one of the most surprising sentences in the prophets.

Thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, unto all that are carried away captives, whom I have caused to be carried away from Jerusalem unto Babylon; Build ye houses, and dwell in them; and plant gardens, and eat the fruit of them.Jeremiah 29:4-5

Read who it is addressed to. Not settlers. Not people who chose it. People carried away, to a city they hated, who fully expected to go home and were praying about nothing else.

And the word is: build. Plant. Eat the fruit.

Planting a garden is the single most committed thing a person can do with a piece of land. It is an announcement that you will be there for the growing. It is the opposite of living out of a truck.

He told them to do it in Babylon.

You are being told to build on ground that was never yours and was never chosen. Jeremiah 29:5 has God instructing people in a city they were carried to unwillingly to build houses and plant gardens and eat the fruit, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept that word addressed to captives rather than to settlers, which means the ground under your boots is exactly the ground the instruction was written for.

What the two years have actually been

Now the truck, because it deserves an honest look rather than being called a failure.

Living light has been loyalty. That is the truth under it and it is not shameful. Not driving a stake in has felt like refusing to agree that the move was permanent, and refusing to agree has felt like the last thing you could still do for a place you loved.

That is faithfulness pointed at a location.

You have been keeping faith with a place, and nobody is asking you to stop loving it in order to put a tree in the ground. Psalm 137:5 says if I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning, and it is written by exiles who were also, at that very time, being told to plant gardens where they were, and it is the same Spirit who held both of those in one people at one time, which means remembering and planting were never alternatives.

What a fourteen year old noticed

Here is the thing she said, and it has been going round for three weeks and it deserves to be answered rather than avoided.

Papa, we have ended up.

She was not saying it is over. She was saying we are here, and we have been here for two years, and the word for that in the language everybody else uses is home.

You were being told something by a child who has already done what you have not done, and she was not accusing anybody. Deuteronomy 6:7 says to teach these things to thy children when thou sittest in thine house and when thou walkest by the way, and it puts the house and the road in the same sentence without ranking them, and it is the same Spirit who brings a word to a young mind, which means what she needs from you is not the old ground. It is a father who is where he actually is.