A Full House That Is Not Going to Change

The television goes on at about seven and it does not go off.

Not because anybody is inconsiderate. It goes on because your mother, or your father in law, or whoever it is, has lived a long time and this is what the day sounds like to them, and it has sounded like that for forty years, and the sound is not really about the program.

You know that. That is why you have never said anything.

And you are not going to say anything, and I want to be clear that I am not going to ask you to. In a house like yours, asking an older person to change how their day sounds is not a small request about volume. It is a request about whose house this is, and you understood that a long time ago and made a decision, and the decision was correct.

So you carry it. And what you carry is not the sound. It is the fact that there is nowhere in the building where the day pauses, and no way to ask for one without it costing more than it is worth.

I want to work inside that rather than around it, because a message that requires the household to change is no use to you at all.

What the psalm actually calls good

Psalm 133 is one verse long in the part everybody knows, and I want to read it as somebody who lives in a full house.

Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity! (Psalm 133:1)

Dwell together.

Not visit. Not gather occasionally on a Sunday. Dwell, which is the word for actually living in the same place, with everything that involves, including the noise.

And it calls that good. Not tolerable. Good, and pleasant, and the psalm goes on to compare it to oil running down a beard and dew on a mountain, which are extravagant images for something a lot of people describe as a strain.

So the psalm is not unaware of what a full house is. It is making a claim about it, and the claim is that the thing you are inside is being called good by God before anybody has turned anything down.

You are inside something God calls good, and He called it that with the television on. Psalm 133:1 praises brethren dwelling together rather than brethren living quietly, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as honor rather than as a consolation.

I want to hold that a moment longer, because I think you may have been carrying a low grade sense that a house like yours is a compromise. A stage before a proper arrangement. Something to be managed.

It is not. It is the thing the psalm calls good with both hands.

You have a household that Scripture reaches for extravagant images to describe, and it was chosen rather than merely allowed. Psalm 133 compares dwelling together to precious oil and to dew on a mountain. The Spirit of God is the one who can take a strain and show a person its worth without pretending it is easy.

Pockets, not rooms

Now the practical part, and it takes account of what you cannot ask for.

Stop looking for a room and start looking for a pocket.

A room requires other people to agree. A pocket does not. A pocket is two minutes that exists inside the household as it already runs, and every full house is full of them, and nobody has to be told.

The kettle taking four minutes to boil. The walk from the car to the door. The two minutes after somebody has gone into another room. The gap while the program changes. The last thing at night when everybody has finally gone up.

None of those requires a single person to do anything differently, which is exactly why they will work and a request would not.

You have pockets in a house that will never have rooms, and they were there before you started looking. Psalm 133:1 blesses a household as it actually is rather than as it might be arranged, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can meet somebody in four minutes beside a kettle.

And one plain thing before we go on, said once. If what is loud is not the house but something in your own head, and if some part of you has been thinking about not being here, tell one person today. In the United States you can call or text 988, at any hour. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, or one person whose number you know by heart. That is the right next thing and God is entirely in it.

Do not resent what you chose

There is one more thing, and I say it as somebody from a house like this.

The danger in carrying something quietly is not the carrying. It is that after enough years a quiet decision can turn into a grievance without anybody deciding, and the person it lands on is the person you decided to protect.

You chose not to ask. That was a good choice and it came from love.

But a good choice that never gets renewed goes stale, and a stale one starts to feel like something that was done to you.

So renew it. Out loud, to God, once, in one of those pockets. Say it plainly: I chose this and I am choosing it again today.

That is not a small piece of psychology. It moves a thing out of the category of burden and back into the category of gift, and those two feel entirely different to live in even when they contain the identical Tuesday.

You are able to choose it again rather than merely endure it, and the choosing was always what made it a gift. Psalm 133:1 calls the dwelling together good rather than calling it borne. The Spirit of God is the one who can turn a thing carried into a thing given.