He can still describe the old kitchen better than the one he stands in now.
They moved for good reasons. Work, safety, the children's schooling, the whole reasonable list, and he would make the same decision again. But something did not come with them, and it took him eighteen months to be able to put a name on what it was.
He prayed in the new house from the first week. He kept everything he had kept before. And it was like praying into a room with the furniture removed.
By the end of that first year he had arrived at a sentence, and he was too embarrassed to say it out loud even to his wife: I think God stayed there. Not that He is gone, not that He is angry. That the God he knew belonged to a place he no longer lives in, and that what he has now is the memory of Him and a set of habits.
Eighteen months. Then things eased, and he never went back to examine the sentence, and it has been quietly sitting under everything since.
If you left something behind that you could not carry, come and sit in the courtyard. I am not going to tell you what God was doing in those months, because I have no idea.
What actually got left behind
Let us look at what really did not come with you, because it was real and it was not God.
The old room. The particular light in it at a particular hour. The community who knew your name without asking. The version of yourself that lived there, and the language your prayers had learned in that place. All of that is genuine and losing it is a genuine loss, and nobody should tell a man to get over it.
But you attached the loss to a Person, and a Person is not a place, and that attachment has been running your inner life for a year and a half.
You did not leave God in another building. Nothing about a move has ever changed where He is. I am not saying it to console you. The written word says the LORD is nigh unto all them that call upon him (Psalm 145:18), where all is a word about people rather than about postcodes, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not the sentence, who makes it live in a kitchen a man does not love yet.
The woman who named Him in the wrong place
Here is what changed this for me, and it is not a technique for settling in.
There is a woman in the book who runs away, pregnant and mistreated, into a desert, and stops beside a spring in a country that is not hers and belongs to nobody she knows. And that is where God finds her, and she does something nobody in Scripture has done before.
And she called the name of the LORD that spake unto her, Thou God seest me.Genesis 16:13
She names Him. She is the first person in the Bible to give God a name, and she does it in a wilderness, as a foreigner, in the least established place in her entire life.
Not in a house. Not in a place of worship. Beside a spring on the road to somewhere she was not planning to go.
You are in a place He is already in, and the Word records His clearest self disclosure happening to somebody a long way from home. That is written down exactly that way, and the Holy Spirit sets that down in front of a man who has been quietly grieving a kitchen.
Nothing is being added to your eighteen months
Something has to be said here plainly, because a paragraph like the last one usually arrives with a theory attached.
I am not going to tell you what those months were for. Not stretching you, not deepening you, not weaning you off a place. Anybody who explains a season they were not in is decorating it.
You have one claim in this article and it is the whole of it: He was there. Nothing further is being added to your year and a half. Scripture says whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence (Psalm 139:7), which is a question asked about the ends of the earth and answered with no exceptions, and the Holy Spirit is the One who was in the new house on the first night, before the boxes were open.
And if that season left more behind than anybody at this table knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.
So this is where it turns, and it is not a promise about how you will feel in that kitchen next month.
God was in that place and you did not know it. He was near you on the worst night of those eighteen months, and nothing about the move put you outside His reach. The written word says if I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me (Psalm 139:9 and 10), which is a sentence built out of distance and ends in a hand, and the Holy Spirit is the one making that true about your actual house rather than about migrants in general.
I cannot tell you what God does next about the new place, or when it starts to feel like yours. Nobody honest can. What I can tell you is that a year and a half of praying into an empty room was never a year and a half of praying into an empty room.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, in your own voice. The standing to speak like this is yours in Christ, and it was never issued on the strength of how settled you feel. Scripture is the ground under it, the Holy Spirit is what makes it living rather than merely resigned, and what God does about this house, and when, is His, however He answers, and nothing on this page pretends to know.
- Eighteen months in the new place, you are a hard beginning and you are not the stretch God stayed behind for. Psalm 145 says the Lord is nigh unto all who call upon Him, where all is a word about people rather than postcodes, and the Holy Spirit was in this kitchen before the boxes were open. In the name of Jesus I stop reading you as a departure.
- Sentence I was too embarrassed to say to my own wife, you are a sentence God did not say, and you are not sitting in this courtyard tonight. Genesis 16 has a foreign woman beside a spring in a desert giving God a name nobody had given Him before, and His Spirit made that the clearest self disclosure in the book so far. I am naming my season out loud tonight instead of hiding it.
- Father, You see me, and Genesis 16 has that spoken first by somebody a long way from anywhere she belonged. I thank You that Your Spirit led me by the hand through the uttermost parts of that year and a half. Here is the season by its name, out loud, and here is one sentence to You about it.
Genesis 16:13
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