The Flat I Was Only Staying In

Two boxes in the hall, still taped, with a marker pen line on them from a flat he left five years ago.

He took this one for six months. That is the honest history of it. Six months while he sorted a couple of things out, in a city he was passing through, in a building where the buzzer has never worked and the man downstairs plays music that comes up through the floor at a frequency you feel rather than hear.

Five years in September.

Nothing is on the walls. There is one nail, which was there when he came, and he has never put anything on it, and he has looked at it a great deal.

He does not buy things for the flat. He has a good pan and a bad pan and he uses the bad pan mostly, because buying a second good pan would be a statement. He has a folding chair. He has a mattress on the floor and a proper bed frame would be, again, a statement.

He knows how this sounds. He has heard himself explain it to two different people and both times the explanation came out worse than the situation.

Here is what he has not said to anybody.

About a year ago he stopped believing he was leaving. Not consciously. He just noticed one evening that he had stopped looking at listings, and had stopped saying next year, and that the six months had become a way of living rather than a plan.

And instead of unpacking he simply stopped mentioning it, and the flat became a place he is in but has not agreed to.

Last Thursday the woman upstairs knocked to say her ceiling was leaking, and he stood in his own hallway apologizing for a flat he has never once thought of as his.

He woke up and found out where he had been sleeping

Sit down on the folding chair, because there is a man in Genesis who spent a night in a place he had no intention of staying in and got the surprise of his life.

Jacob is running. He is between one thing and another with nothing settled, and night comes down where it comes down, and he lies on the ground with a stone under his head, in a spot that is not a destination and has no name worth mentioning.

And in the night he sees the ladder, and the angels, and God standing above it.

And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not.Genesis 28:16

I knew it not.

That is a man discovering that the location he had written off as a gap between two real places had God in it the entire time he was asleep on a rock in it.

Hear this in your own hallway. You are not living in a gap, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture puts the presence of God in an unnamed roadside stop that a running man did not choose, and the Holy Spirit has been in that flat for five years with the music coming up through the floor.

Now let me name what the taped boxes are actually doing, because they are not neutral and they have not been for a long time.

A place you have not agreed to is a place you cannot receive anything from, and the written word says God was in the one Jacob wrote off, and the Holy Spirit has been handing you things in that building for five years. Every ordinary good thing in it goes past you unclaimed, because claiming it would look like settling, and settling would mean admitting the six months was never true.

That is the cost. Not the mattress. The five years of not letting a place be good to you in case it turned out to be permanent.

And hear this too, because it is where the shame is sitting. You have not failed by staying, and Scripture is what says so. What is written never once treats an unchosen place as a lesser one, and the Spirit of God is not somewhere else waiting for you to arrive at the life you intended, because He was already in the place you were only passing through.

Now, the thing Jacob does next, because it is small and physical and it is the whole answer.

He takes the stone he had under his head, and he sets it up. He stands it on its end. He pours oil on it, and he gives the place a name, and then he goes on with his journey, because he is still going, and it is still not his destination.

He did not stop traveling. He marked the ground.

That is what is available to you tonight, and it costs about four minutes. Not a decision to stay forever. Not a lease, not a plan, not an announcement. A stone stood on its end in a place you were only passing through, because the written word says the Lord was in this place, and the Holy Spirit has been in it since the day you dropped the bags in the hall.