The Applications I Stopped Sending

The seventh one has been open on her laptop for nine days, and she has typed her name into it twice and closed it both times.

Six. She has kept a count without ever meaning to keep a count. The first was the flat above the shop, and the woman was apologetic and used the phrase our criteria. The second sent an automated email at eleven at night, which somehow made it worse. The fourth was the one that hurt, because the agent had been so warm on the phone that she had already imagined where the table would go.

She has a job. She has had it for four years. She has never missed a rent payment in the place she is in now, which is a place she is leaving because it is being sold.

But there was a period, seven years ago, and it is on her file, and it will be on her file for a while yet.

So now the seventh form sits open. And here is what she noticed at about two in the morning last week, which is the honest reason it is still blank: a no that she does not ask for is not a no. Six have been given to her. The seventh, if she simply does not send it, will never exist. And there is a small terrible relief in that, and the relief is now stronger than the wanting.

She has started saying things out loud like, I will probably just stay put, in a bright voice, to people who know she cannot stay put.

You know that form. Yours might be a job, or a course, or a thing you would have to be interviewed for. There is a door you have stopped walking up to, and you would tell anybody it is realism, and underneath the realism is a much simpler arrangement: if you do not knock, nobody has to answer.

Come in and sit down and let me make you something. There is a very strange thing a prophet did in a city that was already surrounded, and I want to tell you about it before you touch that form again.

There is no code, and there is a deed in a jar

Let me say the plain thing first, because the name over the door of this site promises a secret and I am not going to keep a woman who is losing her home reading in hope of one.

There is no code. There is nothing in Scripture that clears a file, and I am not going to tell you that the seventh will be a yes, because I have not been told that and nobody honest will tell you they have. Nothing here promises an outcome and nothing here dates one.

Here is what happened. Jerusalem is under siege. The Babylonian army is outside the walls, the fall of the city is not in doubt, and the prophet who has been saying it will fall is in prison for saying so. And in the middle of that, God tells him to buy a field.

A field. In a country that is about to be emptied. He buys it, and he signs the deed, and he weighs out the money in front of witnesses, and then he is told to put the deeds in an earthen jar so they will last a long time. And this is the reason he is given.

For thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Houses and fields and vineyards shall be possessed again in this land.Jeremiah 32:15

That signing was not a prediction with a date on it. Jeremiah did not live to farm that field. It was a signature made in the middle of a hopeless week, on the authority of somebody else's word, and it was the most stubborn act of his entire life.

You are not being asked to be optimistic, and the asking was never the same thing as the answer. That is not a comfort I have arranged over tea. It is written in Jeremiah 32, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a deed in an earthen jar and lays it beside a form that has been open on a laptop for nine days.

You have a God who told a man to sign for ground in a city that was already lost, and He has never once required the odds to look good before He would move. Scripture says houses and fields and vineyards shall be possessed again in this land, which is the reason attached to a signature nobody sensible would have made, and His Spirit is the one who takes that and makes it a hand able to fill in a form.

Now let me sit in the quiet with you, because I do not want to be brisk about the six.

Six is a lot. Every one of them cost you something, and the fourth one cost you more than you have told anybody, because you had already imagined the table. And what six does, over months, is not make you sad. It teaches you a skill, and the skill is called not wanting things, and you have become quite good at it, and it works.

That is what is actually holding the seventh form shut. Not the file. The skill.

You are not being unrealistic by wanting a home, and the ability to stop wanting things is a wound rather than a maturity. Scripture says hope deferred maketh the heart sick, but when the desire cometh it is a tree of life, which is God naming both halves of exactly this, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes the first half feel understood instead of shameful.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because a form does not get filled in because somebody was gentle with you on a sofa. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what protecting yourself never does. So speak, out loud, in your own front room. You have the standing to speak to a refusal you have been anticipating and tell it what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that yours by position rather than by history, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word much further than a laptop screen.