It Got Lost In The Move

There is a box in the garage marked KITCHEN MISC in his own handwriting from two houses ago, and it has never been opened, and everybody in the family knows about it and it has become a joke.

Nine addresses. Four countries. Twenty-three years.

He can list them in order the way some men list cars. The flat above the laundry with the window that would not shut. The married quarters with the concrete yard. The house with the mango tree where the second one was born. The apartment on the eleventh floor where the lift broke for five months. The one they were only supposed to be in for a year and were in for six.

And at the first one, the flat above the laundry, when he was twenty-four and had just come to the Lord in a way that turned his whole life sideways in about nine days, he meant to do it.

He remembers deciding. He remembers standing at that window that would not shut, at night, with the smell of the laundry coming up, and thinking: this, and then that. There was a man called Pastor Simeon who ran a small thing in a rented room and who would have done it in a heartbeat, and there were two other people who were going to as well, and it was going to be at the end of the dry season.

Then the posting came through, three weeks early, and there was a scramble, and there were boxes, and the end of the dry season happened somewhere else entirely with no Pastor Simeon in it.

And that is the whole story. There is no drama in it anywhere. Nobody let him down and he did not run from anything. It got lost in the move, the way the good scissors got lost in the move, and the box of photos from before he was married got lost in the move, and a certain kind of confidence he had at twenty-four got lost in the move.

He is forty-seven. He has served in five churches in four countries. He has translated for two of them. He has carried other people's furniture up stairs in three languages.

And there is a thing in him that he has never had a name for until recently, which is the feeling of being permanently in transit. Not homeless. He has a good home. In transit, spiritually, as though the real settling is at the next address, and it always has been.

Somebody got there first

I want to start where I think you have never started, which is with the timing.

You have been telling this to yourself for twenty-three years as a story about something you missed. A near miss. A thing that would have happened if the posting had come three weeks later than it did.

I want to put a different fact underneath it, and I want you to let it sit there rather than argue with it.

And the LORD, he it is that doth go before thee; he will be with thee, he will not fail thee, neither forsake thee: fear not, neither be dismayed.Deuteronomy 31:8

He it is that doth go before thee. That is the sentence, and it is not about God following you and keeping up. It is about God arriving first. He was at the married quarters before the truck was. He was in the house with the mango tree before your second child was. You have never once arrived anywhere ahead of Him, and that is not a comforting way of looking at it, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is going into you rather than past you.

Now let me say something about the word lost.

You have been using it about this for two decades, and it is the right word for scissors and it is the wrong word for what happened at that flat above the laundry. Because a thing that is lost is a thing that is somewhere, out of reach, and that framing puts your standing with God in a box in a garage in a country you no longer live in.

You are not waiting on a retrieval. Nothing of yours is in that box. Scripture says the Lord goes before and does not fail and does not forsake, and the Spirit of God has been the seal on you since nine days after your life turned sideways at twenty-four, and none of that was in the truck.

I want to speak to the in-transit thing, because I think that is the real subject and the rest is scenery.

There is a way of living that a person who has moved nine times learns, and it is not a fault, it is a skill: you do not fully unpack. You keep the boxes flat behind the wardrobe. You do not paint. You do not plant anything that takes three years. And after enough addresses that skill stops being about furniture and starts operating on the inside, and a man ends up living his life with God the way he lives in a house he might be leaving.

You are settled in Christ whether or not you are settled anywhere else. That is the word of God and not my encouragement, and the same Spirit who has been with you in four countries is the one making it true in you rather than merely true.

And here is the thing about the five churches and the three languages of other people's furniture.

You have carried the house of God on your back across a quarter of a century. That was not you waiting for the real thing to start. That was the real thing. The word says God goes before and is with, both, simultaneously, and a man who has translated in two churches and carried sofas in three has been in the middle of the household the whole time, not queueing outside it. The Holy Spirit has been the one carrying you while you carried it, which is the arrangement Deuteronomy describes when it says the Lord goes before.