The Roof He Keeps Not Fixing

The bucket lives in the back bedroom now, which is how you know it has been going on a while.

Two winters. It comes in above the window on the north side, and it is not catastrophic and it is not going to bring the ceiling down this year, and it has made a stain about the size of a dinner plate that has got slightly bigger both years.

The younger one sleeps in that room. She has stopped mentioning it.

He has the money. That is the part that would confuse anybody looking in. It is not a fortune and it is not nothing and it is sitting there and has been sitting there. He has the time. He has a cousin in the trade who has offered twice and stopped offering.

The reasons he gives at home have varied. Waiting on a better quote. Waiting for the summer. Wanting to do the whole side at once and doing it properly.

He knows they are not the reason.

The reason is a thing he has never said and can barely think in a straight line, and it goes something like: I do not know that this house is going to be needed. Not in a dramatic way, and not with a date attached. Just a low unwillingness to spend real money on something long, which arrived at some point and has never been examined and has now cost his daughter two winters under a stain.

That last sentence is why he is reading this.

Sit down. There is one line of Christ's that answers this and it is four words in most translations.

Do business till I come

Here it is, from a parable that is entirely about the interval between a departure and a return.

Engage in business until I come.Luke 19:13

A nobleman goes away. He will come back. Nobody is told when, and the whole shape of the story is the gap in between, which is exactly where you are living, and Luke 19:13 sits in the middle of a parable the Spirit inspired around that gap.

And the one instruction he leaves is not to wait, not to watch the road, not to reduce the operation to a holding pattern. It is to trade. To carry on with the work. To do something with what is in your hands during the interval.

Then read what happens to the man who did nothing. He is not condemned for a bad investment. He is condemned for having kept the thing safe and still because he was afraid, which is the exact posture two winters of a bucket describes.

You are inside an instruction to carry on rather than to hold. Luke 19:13 gives that as the only command for the gap, and the Spirit inspired a story in which the man who preserved and did nothing was the one in trouble.

The house is not the point

Now the roof, and the honest thing here is that this is not really about a roof.

Nobody is going to be assessed on a roof. What is under the roof is a family, and what has actually happened over two winters is that a low unexamined assumption has been allowed to make a decision about your daughter's bedroom.

That is the shape of it and it is worth stating plainly, because the assumption never presents itself as a decision. It presents itself as a delay. Delays do not feel like choices, which is precisely how they get to make so many of them.

Two winters of stain is a choice that was never consciously made.

You are not being faithful by leaving it. Nothing written anywhere makes a leaking roof over a child a form of devotion, and the Spirit does not produce a hesitation that costs somebody else something real.

And notice who is paying. Not you. She has stopped mentioning it, which children do when they have worked out that a subject goes nowhere.

What the interval is for

Here is the part that makes this bearable rather than shaming.

The interval is not a waiting room. That is the picture underneath the last two winters: a corridor, with chairs, where the sensible posture is to sit still and start nothing.

The parable does not describe a corridor. It describes a going concern, handed over, with instructions to run it.

Which means the roof is not a distraction from the spiritual thing. Fixing the roof is the spiritual thing, in the same sense that trading was, and there is no separate category where the real obedience is kept.

That is worth pressing, because the split runs deeper than a roof. A man who believes there is a spiritual department and a practical department will always underfund the practical one, and will always feel faintly virtuous about it, and the people who live with him will pay for the feeling. Scripture does not run that split anywhere. It has a great deal to say about roofs, and walls, and paying people on time, and none of it is filed as a lesser matter.

You are permitted to spend real money on something long. What is written puts the command to do business right in the middle of the interval, and the Spirit is not honored by a household run as though it were temporary accommodation.

Ring your cousin. He stopped offering, which means somebody has to go first, and it is going to be you.

And say something to your daughter. Not an explanation of any of this, which would be a weight and not a gift. Just that the roof is getting done, and when. She has been sleeping under a stain for two winters and has learned not to raise it, and the thing that undoes that is not an apology, it is a date. Nothing written anywhere asked a child to carry a parent quiet decision, and the Spirit is at work in a house where somebody says out loud what is going to happen.