Firm Steps on a Six-Month Lease

The dryer he always uses is the one with the cracked door seal, third from the end, because it runs a little hot and gets the work shirts done in one cycle instead of two. He knows this the way he knows which of the apartment's kitchen drawers sticks and which stair on the way up creaks: knowledge he did not want, gathered because it was cheaper than not having it. The laundrette on a Tuesday night is students with a single bag, a woman with two small children sorting socks into pairs on the long table, and him, forty-four, agency contract, third address in two years, folding shirts he will need for a shift he does not yet know the location of.

His phone lights on the table beside the folded pile. It is the property manager. Owner has decided to sell. Formal notice to follow, but wanted to give you a heads up. A heads up. He reads it twice and puts the phone face down and picks up the next shirt, because his hands have learned to keep going when the ground gives, and this is what that looks like now. Not shock. Not even anger. A sort of tired arithmetic that begins on its own: two months, deposit, van hire, the drawer that sticks will be somebody else's drawer, the boy across the table will grow up in one house and never know what this is.

He does not expect anything to be permanent. He stopped expecting it somewhere around the second flat, when he noticed he had not unpacked the box of books and did not intend to. That is the honest state of things, and there is a kind of relief in admitting it: no more waiting for the arrangements to settle, because they are not going to. He is not being dramatic. He is being accurate. Nothing in his life is fixed and he has stopped pretending it might be.

You know this table. You may not be at a laundrette and it may not be a lease, but you know the exact feeling of the phone lighting up with the next thing that was never going to hold, and your hands going on with the folding. You have stopped expecting anything to be permanent, and I am not going to tell you that you are wrong about the arrangements. I want to tell you something about the man folding the shirts.

What He makes firm

Let me name the weight first, because you carry it every day and almost nobody sees it. It is not only that the apartment is temporary. It is that the temporary flat sits inside temporary work, and the temporary work sits inside a life where you cannot make a decision, because every decision has to be made from ground that might not be there by the time the decision matters. So you stopped deciding. You stopped unpacking. You stopped, in a quiet way, expecting to be steadied at all, because steady was always going to arrive with the settled arrangements, and the settled arrangements never arrived, and the arithmetic is done.

I am a teacher and I read texts for a living, so let me read one to you carefully.

He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.Psalm 40:2

Look at what God is said to make firm in that line, and look at what He is not said to make firm. He does not establish the pit. He does not tidy the bog. He does not hand David a fixed address on the far side of it. What He sets is the feet, and what He makes firm is the steps. The Hebrew word underneath making secure is from the same root that Scripture uses everywhere for established, and the thing it is attached to here is a man's walking. Not his walls. His steps.

You are established, and it is your steps He has made firm, not your arrangements. I am not building that on a feeling. It is what the written text says God does, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a line on a page true in a person at a laundrette table. The lease is provisional. The contract is provisional. You are not.

This is the site's first category for a reason and it runs first because it is the definition. Being established is something God does to a person. It is not something a person acquires along with a mortgage, a ring, or a permanent post. Scripture is unusually consistent about this, and I want to show you the strangest example of it.

The people who moved forty-two times

The children of Israel lived in tents for forty years. Numbers 33 lists their stations, and there are forty-two of them. Nobody in that generation ever had a permanent address. Read Numbers 9 and see how they knew when to go: a cloud rested over the tent of meeting, and when the cloud lifted they packed, and where it settled they stopped. Sometimes it stayed a year. Sometimes it stayed one night and lifted at dawn.

Whether it was two days, or a month, or a longer time, that the cloud continued over the tabernacle, abiding there, the people of Israel remained in camp and did not set out, but when it lifted they set out.Numbers 9:22

Notice what nobody in that camp was fixed to. Not a place. Not a plan. Not a lease length, because the lease length was two days or a month or a year and they were never told which in advance. And notice what they were fixed to. The cloud. His presence, over the tent, in the middle of the camp, every day for forty years. They were the most provisionally housed people in Scripture, and they were not for one day unestablished, because what held them was never the ground under the tent pegs. It was the One over the tent.

You are held the way that camp was held: fixed to Him and not to the arrangements. The written record of those forty years is the anchor for that, and the Spirit who rested over that tent is the Spirit who rests on you, which is what Paul means when he says God has established us in Christ and put His Spirit in our hearts (2 Corinthians 1:21-22). Established, in a tent, on a lease of unknown length. That is not a lesser kind of established. It is the original kind.

I want to be careful here, because I know the move a hurting person's mind makes at this point. It hears fixed to Him and quietly translates it into so the apartment will work out. I am not saying that. I have no word about the apartment, and I would be lying to you if I pretended to. The cloud lifted forty-two times. The moving may not be nearly over. What I am saying is that whether the cloud lifts next month or in ten years, it does not decide whether you are standing, because that was decided by Someone who does not move.

You have a foundation tonight, and it is not the lease. The Lord Himself said that whoever hears His words and does them is like a man who dug deep and laid a foundation on the rock (Luke 6:48), and the flood came and could not shake the house. He did not say the flood would not come. He said the rock would hold. His Spirit is the one carrying that from the page into your body while you sit at that table.

You have had firm steps under you through all three of those addresses, and not one lease was ever consulted about it. Psalm 40:2 says He set my feet upon a rock and made my steps secure, and it is the Spirit of God who makes an old psalm land in a laundrette on a weeknight.

If any of this ever turns dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and tell a doctor or a counselor the plain truth about the housing and the nights. Being established by God has never been a reason to face a hard stretch without a real person in the room.