This House Was Going to Be Different

She drew it. That is the thing she has never told anybody, because she was nineteen and it is embarrassing and she still has the page.

It is a floor plan, badly drawn, of a house she did not have. There is a kitchen with a big table in it. There is a room marked quiet. And in the margin, in the handwriting of a nineteen year old, are about eleven words about what this house would be, and the word peaceful appears twice.

She grew up in a house where the shouting was the weather. Nobody was cruel in a way that would go in a report. It was simply loud, all the time, and unpredictable in a way that meant a child in that house was never entirely off duty.

And she told God, at nineteen, with that page in front of her, that hers would be nothing like it.

She is forty one, and she has a house, and it is loud.

Not the same loud. She has thought about that a great deal and she is honest enough to know it is not the same. But there is a fourteen year old who slams things, and there is a week last month she is not proud of, and the kitchen table has a wobble in it and half the time nobody eats at it because of the shifts, and there is no room marked quiet in the entire building.

And what she has concluded, in a very ordinary Tuesday sort of way, is that she failed. That the promise was about a kind of house and she did not produce that kind of house, and what she produced instead is ordinary.

You may be measuring an actual house against a house you drew. And ordinary may have become, in your head, the same thing as failed.

The widest possible scope

Now let me put a verse in front of you and make you notice how much of your life it reaches, because you have been living as though very little of it counts.

Paul is finishing a list of instructions about ordinary household behavior, and he closes it with a sentence that has almost no edges.

And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him.Colossians 3:17

You are living inside the whole scope of that sentence, and none of it was ever conditional on the rooms being quiet. Colossians 3:17 says whatsoever and then says in word or deed in case anybody narrowed it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been in this loud house all along.

Whatsoever, in word or deed

Whatsoever. That is a word chosen to leave nothing out, and then he adds in word or deed in case anybody tried.

So the scope is: everything you say and everything you do. Not the quiet room. Not the meal where everybody is present. The shifts, the wobbling table, the fourteen year old, the sandwich eaten standing up, the week last month.

And here is what is not in the sentence, and it matters more than what is: there is no adjective about the conditions. He does not say do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, in a peaceful house. He does not describe a setting at all, because he is writing to households in rented rooms in a port city, and if peaceful conditions were the requirement he would have disqualified every reader he had.

You are living in the whole of the scope of that verse and none of it was ever conditional on the house being quiet. Colossians 3:17 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a list of household instructions and stands it in a living room with music on and children on the floor.

And now the rule of this category, which does not bend: nothing here is exercised over anybody's will, and that includes a fourteen year old who slams things.

She is fourteen. She is allowed to be, and you cannot declare her into being restful, and I am not going to hand you language for it.

You are released from producing a kind of house, and the covenant reaches the one you have. Scripture takes the widest word available and attaches no conditions to the rooms, and the Spirit of God has been in that loud ordinary house the whole time.

What the nineteen year old was doing

And now let me say something about the page, gently, because you have been ashamed of it and you should not be.

A nineteen year old who has come out of a house where the shouting was the weather does not draw a floor plan because she is naive. She draws it because it is the only form of prayer available to her at nineteen. She had no words for what she wanted, so she drew a room and marked it quiet.

That page is not a specification you failed to build. It is a girl telling God what she was afraid of.

And He answered it. Not by giving you the room marked quiet. By giving you a house where a fourteen year old can slam a door and nobody in that building is on duty, and where a week you are not proud of is a week you are not proud of rather than the weather.

You are standing in a house that is different in the way that mattered and not in the way you drew. It is written in exactly those terms, and that is what whatsoever in word or deed means when it lands in an actual family's evening, and His Spirit is the one who has been in these rooms since before there were any.