We Moved And Lost Everything We Did

The move went well. That is what everybody says and it is true.

The house is better. The rooms are the right shape. You have unpacked almost everything, the internet works, the children are in school, the paperwork is done and nobody has cried about it for a while.

And something has gone that you cannot find the name of.

It came to you last Tuesday. In the old place, Tuesday had a shape. You knew what Tuesday was. There was a thing that happened after dinner, and a thing the children did, and a walk somebody took, and none of it was written down anywhere and all of it was real.

Here, Tuesday is a day when nothing in particular happens and then it is bedtime.

You have not lost a routine. You have lost about eleven of them, all at once, and every single one was invisible until it was gone, because none of them were ever decided. They grew.

That is the true cost of a move and nobody warns you about it. Not the boxes. The boxes are the easy part. The part nobody says is that a household's habits are attached to a building, and when you take the household out of the building most of them do not come.

So here is the question. Not how do we get all of it back. You will not get all of it back, and some of it belonged to a house you no longer live in.

The question is which one goes back first.

What mean ye by these stones

There is a moment in Joshua where a whole nation has just crossed into a new place, and the first instruction is not about building or farming or defending.

That this may be a sign among you, that when your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean ye by these stones? (Joshua 4:6, King James Version)

That this may be a sign among you, so that when your children ask in time to come, what do these stones mean.

They took twelve stones out of the riverbed and set them down on the other side. That was the first act in the new country. Before anything useful, a physical thing, put in a place, that a child would later ask about.

You have arrived somewhere new, and the written word has never once started that with an explanation or a family conversation about how everybody is feeling. Joshua 4:6 begins the new place with stones carried by hand and set down where they can be seen, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ordinary object into a marker.

You have been trying to rebuild this house with words. Talking about the old place. Reassuring the children. Telling everybody it will settle.

And notice what the stones actually are. They are not a monument to the crossing. They are an answer waiting for a question that has not been asked yet. The children who ask about them have not been born.

That is what a household habit is. It is a thing you do so plainly and so regularly that in ten years somebody says, we always used to, and cannot remember starting.

You are laying down the thing that your children will one day describe as what this family always did, and none of that has never once required a ceremony to begin. Joshua 4:6 puts the sign in the ground first and lets the meaning come later, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a small repeated act into a landmark.

You are three months in and you are worried that this house has no character. It has no character because nothing has happened in it twice yet. That is all.

One stone, and it has to be physical

Here is the practical instruction, and the first half of it is a restriction.

Put one thing back. One. Not the eleven.

You are able to choose a single thing and let the rest stay gone, and rebuilding has never once been required to happen all at once. It is written in Joshua that twelve stones were carried out and set down in one place, and the Holy Spirit is the one who begins a new season with something small enough to carry.

You have the instinct to restore the whole week, because the whole week is what you are grieving. That instinct will produce a list, and the list will be attempted for nine days.

And the second half of the instruction is that it has to be physical.

Not a family night. Not a conversation. Not a board game, and I have nothing against board games. Something where the bodies move, in this new place, on this new street, because the reason this house feels like a hotel is that nobody has used it yet.

You have a street outside this door that is still a set of directions rather than a place, and that has never once been fixed by anybody looking at it through a window. Joshua 4:6 marks new ground with something physically carried into it, and the Spirit of God is the one who turns unfamiliar ground into somebody's own.

A place becomes yours through your body, not through your opinion of it. You know this from every place you have ever loved. You knew where the ground went soft. You knew which way the wind came. None of that arrived by looking at it.

Your door to the far corner

So here is the assignment, and it is the smallest possible stone.

Walk from your own front door to the far corner of this street and back, with one of the children, tonight.

You are able to do the first ordinary thing this family will do twice in this house, and the beginning of it has never once needed to be marked or explained. It is written in Joshua that the stones were set up so a child could ask about them later, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a first walk down an unfamiliar street.

You have not walked this street. You have driven it about two hundred times and you could not tell me what is at the far end of it.

Take one of them. Go to the corner. Look at what is there. Come back. It is nine minutes.

Then do it tomorrow at the same time, and the day after, and here is the part that makes it a stone rather than an outing: you do not comment on it, and you do not tell them it is a new tradition. Traditions announced on day one are dead by day nine.

You were the one who brought this family here, and carrying them through the settling has never once been a job you were left to do by yourself. Joshua 4:6 gives the whole nation a sign it did not have to invent, and the Spirit of God is the one who goes ahead of a household into a place it does not know yet.

In about six weeks one of them will say, are we going to the corner. That is the moment the stone is set. You will not feel anything when it happens.