And I Did Not Know It

Nico sleeps on a sofa bed in his mother-in-law's back room and he has stopped praying in it.

Not deliberately. He would not have been able to tell you he had stopped until Pilar asked him something in the car in February and he heard his own answer.

They had the house for eleven years. Not a grand house. A three bedroom with a bad boiler and a garden that took him two summers to sort out, and he did sort it out, and the last two years there were the best of his life.

He lost the job in the March. The other thing did not come through. There was a period he does not talk about, and by the November the house was somebody else's and the four of them were here, in two rooms, with Pilar's mother being extraordinarily kind about all of it in a way that is somehow harder than if she were not.

And here is what he cannot get past, and it is not the money and it is not the shame, though both of those are in it.

God was in that house.

That is how it sits in him. The kitchen where he prayed with the kids on school mornings. The step where he sat the night Pilar's tests came back fine. The garden he sorted out, where something happened one evening in the second summer that he has never described to anybody and would not know how to.

Eleven years of God, in specific rooms, and those rooms belong to a family from out of town now.

He does not think God has abandoned him. He would reject that flatly. It is more precise and more corrosive than that: he has a settled, unexamined sense that God is still somewhere, and that somewhere is not this back room with a sofa bed in it and somebody else's coats on the door.

They eat four at a table meant for two. Elbows touching. It is genuinely absurd and there is a joke about it in the family now.

And one evening in the spring, Mateo, who is seven, said something so funny that Pilar had to put her fork down, and the grandmother was laughing at the stove with her back turned, and Nico looked round at all of it and thought, quite clearly:

God is not here.

And then, immediately after, in a different voice:

How do I know that.

Jacob was running when the ladder came

There is a night in Genesis that is easy to read as a lovely story and is actually the worst night of a man's life.

Jacob has cheated his brother, lied to his dying father, and left home with what he could carry, and his brother has said out loud that he intends to kill him. He is sleeping outdoors in open country because there is nowhere for him to go, and he has a stone under his head.

That is the setting. And that is where the ladder is.

Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, "Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it."Genesis 28:16

In this place. Not in the house he left. Not in the tent of his father, where the covenant had been spoken over the family for two generations, and not in the future place he was heading toward.

Here. In the open. On the ground he ended up on because everything went wrong.

And I did not know it. Which is the sentence this whole message is for. He was in it and did not know. He was lying on the exact ground where God was, and the not knowing had no effect at all on the fact.

So hear this said over you, at a table meant for two with your elbows touching somebody else's. You are in a place God is in, and the fact that you cannot feel Him in it is the same condition Jacob was in while he slept. That is written down, and it is the Holy Spirit who is described as dwelling in a person rather than in a building, which means the address on the door has never been the relevant question.

Now let me say plainly what I am not saying, because this category is where careless comfort does the most damage.

I am not telling you God took the house to teach you something.

Not to humble you, not to move you, not to show you what really matters. That sentence gets offered to families in your position all the time and it is not in Genesis 28 and it is not here. Jacob's night was the result of a mess he had made and a brother's rage, and God does not appear in the passage to explain any of it. He appears.

And I am not going to tell you a bigger house is coming. I do not know that, and nobody who tells you they do is telling you something they were shown.

What is here is the same thing that is under every article on this site: hidden is not absent.

Here is why that lands so hard in your situation specifically.

You have been treating your faith as though it had a location. Eleven years of it happened in one set of rooms, and rooms are how memory works, so the two got welded together, and when you lost the rooms it felt like losing the God who was in them.

But you did not build those eleven years. He did. And the one thing Genesis 28 establishes, before Jacob has done a single thing right, is that God is not tied to the site where you last met Him.

The word says God does not dwell in houses made by hands, and it says the Spirit of God lives in you. So He was not in the kitchen. He was in the man in the kitchen, and that man is now at a table meant for two with his elbows touching, and every single thing that mattered came with him.

Look at the room again.

Somebody laughing at a stove with her back turned. A boy of seven who is funny. A woman who put her fork down. That is not the leftovers of a life. That is a place where God is, and the only thing missing is that nobody in it has said so out loud.

There was a man five hundred years ago who lost his position, his safety and his name in one year and wrote that God had a habit of turning up under the appearance of the opposite, and that the person who insists on meeting Him only where they met Him last will spend their life missing Him in the present tense.