Somebody Always Came When We Called

There was a number on a card by the door.

That is the whole of your childhood education about how a building works. If something stopped, somebody rang the number, and a man came, usually the same man, and he went into a cupboard with a bag and it stopped being a problem.

Nobody in that apartment ever looked at a valve. There was no reason to. It was not our building and it was not our machinery and the arrangement worked perfectly for eighteen years.

And then you bought a house.

And every single thing in it is yours, including the parts you have never seen, and there is no number on a card by the door, and at thirty four you are standing in a hallway not knowing where anything is.

And what has been sitting under that, and it has been sitting there for two years and not just this week, is a comparison: everybody who grew up in a house learned this by watching, and I did not, and I am starting from the beginning.

You are a man learning what a house needs and not a man who is behind, and growing up where somebody else came has never once been a gap in the person it happened to.

Remember all the way which the LORD thy God led thee

There is an instruction in Deuteronomy to look back over where a people came from, and the tone of it is the useful part.

And thou shalt remember all the way which the LORD thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness. (Deuteronomy 8:2, King James Version)

Remember all the way.

The whole of it. Including the parts that were not chosen, including the years that look in retrospect like time spent somewhere else, including the arrangements that were simply how things were.

And the sentence calls it a way which God led. The route is described as a route God took them on, rather than as a detour they wandered into by mistake.

You are looking back at a road you were led along rather than one you got lost on, and eighteen years in an apartment with a number by the door have never once been a wrong turning in a life. The Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody standing in a hallway at thirty four, and Deuteronomy 8:2 calls the whole way a way God led.

And notice that the remembering is commanded without any correction attached.

He does not say remember and be ashamed. He does not say remember what you failed to learn. The remembering in that verse is for the sake of seeing the whole shape of a road, and the seeing is the point rather than the auditing.

You are permitted to look at your own beginnings without an audit attached, and a childhood spent somewhere that worked differently has never once been a thing to account for. The written word commands the remembering and attaches no reproach, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a man look at where he came from without flinching.

And there is one more thing in that passage worth having on a Tuesday evening.

It is addressed to people about to enter a land they have never farmed, who are going to have to learn an entirely new way of living in it. The remembering is offered to people standing at the start of something, not to people finishing.

You are standing at the beginning of something rather than late to it, and a man taking on a house at thirty four has never once been arriving after everybody else. The Holy Spirit is the one present at the start of a thing rather than only at the end, and Deuteronomy 8:2 speaks to people about to enter.

What everybody else actually learned

Something practical, and it is about the comparison that has been running for two years.

The people who grew up in houses did not learn plumbing. They learned about four things, by accident, from watching a parent do them, usually badly, once or twice, before they were twelve.

They know where a shutoff is because they saw one. That is the whole of the advantage, and it is about six pieces of information total, and every one of them can be acquired by a grown man in an evening.

You are behind by about six facts and not by twenty years, and a handful of household knowledge picked up by accident has never once been an education anybody could not catch up on. The written word speaks to people learning a whole new land, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes six facts a small task rather than a large one.

And here is something that belongs on the other side of the ledger.

You learned things in that apartment that people who grew up in houses did not. How to live close to people. How to hear five families through a wall and stay easy about it. How to manage a small space and a shared stair and a landlord.

Nobody counts those because they do not come up when a machine breaks. They are not nothing.

You were taught a different set of things and they were real, and a childhood that produced one kind of knowledge has never once produced none. The Holy Spirit is the one who counts what a man actually has, and Deuteronomy 8:2 has a people look at the whole way rather than at what they lacked.

So go and find one of the six. Tonight, on your own, with a flashlight, in the way a person finds anything.