The House That Was Sold

Nobody in that family says the word faith any more, and nobody has ever announced that they stopped.

The house was on the corner with the wall his grandfather built, and there were nine of them living in and out of it at any given time. It was sold in about six weeks. His uncle had come back from something with a certainty in him that nobody had seen before, and he was not a stupid man and he was not a weak one, and he had worked out that there was no sense holding property.

Some of the money went. Not all of it. Enough that it mattered, and enough that when the thing did not happen there was a very specific silence at the next family meal.

He was eleven at the time. He is thirty four now.

His uncle is still alive and has never once mentioned it, and everybody has agreed, in the way families agree things without a vote, that it will not be raised. His aunt raised it once, at a wedding, in a tone that was meant to be light and was not, and the room did something that he still remembers.

Here is what he actually carries, and it is not anger about the money. It is that the entire subject went with it. Nobody in that family prays out loud any more. His cousins are polite about religion in the way you are polite about somebody's diet. Something that had been the middle of that house went out the door with the deeds and nobody has ever named it.

He believes. Quietly, on his own, without much support.

Sit down. There is something here that has never been separated out, and separating it is most of the work.

Two things that got sold together

Start by pulling apart the two things your family lost in the same six weeks.

One was a house, and some money, and a certain amount of standing in front of the people who watched it happen. That is real and it deserves to be counted rather than spiritualized away.

The other was a promise, which was never actually involved. Your uncle did not act on what God said. He acted on somebody's calculation about when, and the calculation and the promise are not the same object, and the second one was not damaged by the failure of the first.

That distinction has never been made out loud in your family, which is why the whole thing went out together.

You are holding something that did not fail. What is written was never a schedule and the failure of a schedule leaves it untouched, and the Spirit did not stop testifying to a promise because a man in your family misread a calendar.

He is not slow

Here is the verse that speaks directly into a delay, and notice that it does not treat delay as a problem needing an excuse.

The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.2 Peter 3:9

The people being answered there had noticed that nothing had happened yet. That is the situation the letter addresses, in the first century, which should tell you something about how old this particular disappointment is.

And the answer given is not that the timing is a secret you should stop asking about. The answer is a reason: patience. The time that looks like slowness is described as room being made for people.

That reframes the years after your uncle's sale entirely. They were not evidence of an absent God. What is written calls a stretch like that patience with a purpose in it, and the Spirit inspired that answer for people who had already been let down by their own arithmetic.

You are living inside that patience rather than outside a locked door. 2 Peter 3:9 gives the reason for every year since your uncle sold that house, and the Spirit did not put a family on hold, He put a stretch of time to a use nobody in that kitchen could see.

And notice who the patience is aimed at. Not at the people who are already sure. At the ones who have not got there. Which means the years your family spent not talking about God were years God was described as spending on people exactly like the cousins who stopped.

Not prosecuting your uncle

Now the harder part, and this page is going to be careful with it.

Your uncle is not a villain in this. He is a man who was certain about something nobody was given, and who acted on it at enormous cost to himself, and who has lived for twenty three years in a family that has silently agreed not to mention the largest thing that ever happened to it.

That is its own kind of sentence, and he is serving it.

The instinct to prosecute him is understandable and it would not restore anything. What actually needs saying in that family is not that he was wrong, which everybody knows, but that the thing he was wrong about is not the thing they all quietly stopped doing.

You are allowed to say the true sentence out loud. Nothing written anywhere requires a family to keep a subject sealed for twenty three years, and the Spirit is not honored by a silence that has cost everybody in that house their prayers.

Start with one person. Probably a cousin, probably not at a wedding.

And keep the sentence small when you say it. Not a defense of your uncle and not an argument about doctrine. Something closer to this: we stopped praying in this family because of the house, and I do not think the house had anything to do with God. That is one sentence and it does not require anybody to agree with it on the spot. It only requires somebody to have said it out loud once, after twenty three years, so that the thing is no longer sealed. Nothing written anywhere makes a sealed subject holy, and the Spirit works in rooms where people say true things badly rather than in rooms where nobody says anything at all.