I Park Outside My Own Garage

You park on the street now.

It happened so gradually that there was never a day it started. First it was just for a week while things were being moved around. Then it was easier not to move them back. Then it was winter and it was raining and nobody wants to shift boxes in the rain.

That was two years ago, give or take, and there is a perfectly good garage attached to this house that has not had a vehicle in it since before the last election.

And here is the thing that actually matters, and it is not about parking.

Somewhere in those two years, the word changed. It stopped being the garage and started being the place where all that stuff is. Say it out loud and you will hear it. Nobody in the house calls it a room any more. It has been quietly reclassified as a problem with a roof on it.

A room becomes a problem the day it stops getting used, and after that it is very hard to walk into, because nobody walks into a problem on a Tuesday evening for no reason.

You are a man standing in a room and not in a storage problem, and a space with a stalled job in it has never once stopped being part of your house.

Better is the end of a thing

There is a line in Ecclesiastes that gets read as a motivational slogan and is nothing of the sort.

Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof: and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit. (Ecclesiastes 7:8, King James Version)

Better is the end of a thing than the beginning thereof.

Read it slowly, because it is doing something unusual. It is not saying that finishing is a virtue and starting is a vice. It is a comparison between two positions on the same road, and it is telling a man which direction the good is in.

And then the second half arrives and quietly explains the first. The patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit. Which means this is a verse about how a man gets from one end of a thing to the other, and the answer it gives is patience rather than force.

You have a verse here about direction and not about speed, and Ecclesiastes 7:8 has never once set a date beside the end it recommends. The written word puts patience directly opposite pride, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a man walking toward an end without demanding he arrive tonight.

And notice what the proud in spirit actually is in a context like this one. It is not arrogance. It is the man who will only touch the job if he can do the whole of it, because a partial job would look like a partial man.

That is pride wearing overalls, and it is why a garage sits for two years while a perfectly capable person parks in the rain.

You were never once too weak for that room, and a man who will not start unless he can finish is not a man short of strength. The Spirit of God is the one who can tell pride apart from exhaustion in a tired man, and Ecclesiastes 7:8 sets patience directly against the thing that keeps him out.

What a room is for

So here is the practical claim, and it is about vocabulary before it is about boxes.

That space has a purpose, and the purpose did not go anywhere. A garage is for keeping a vehicle and for working on things. It is still for that. There is simply a stalled job standing between the room and its purpose.

But two years of calling it the place where all that stuff is has taught everybody in the house, including you, that the purpose is gone. And a room with no purpose cannot be entered for a reason, because there are no reasons left in it.

You have a room whose purpose was never revoked, and two years of calling it something else has never once changed what it is for. Ecclesiastes 7:8 speaks of a thing that has an end and therefore has a shape, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps the shape of a thing in view when the household has stopped seeing it.

And here is the second half, which is about the door.

The door is shut. It has been shut for so long that opening it now feels like a commitment, as though lifting it means starting, and starting means the whole weekend, and the whole weekend is not available.

So the door stays down, and the room stays a problem, and the man stays on the street.

You are able to open a door without that door signing you up for anything, and lifting it has never once been the first step of a project you did not agree to. The Spirit of God is the one standing on a driveway with a man whose hand is on the handle, and the written word commends patience to him rather than a schedule.

Three minutes inside, and say what it is

Here is the assignment. It is small and it is slightly strange, and the strangeness is the point.

Open the door. All the way up, not partway.

Walk in and stand there for three minutes. Not at the edge. In it, as far as the stuff allows, in the middle of the floor if there is a middle.

Do not move anything. Do not start sorting. Do not work out what would have to go where. If you catch yourself planning, that is the old thing, and you can let it go.

You have three minutes of standing in your own garage available tonight, and standing in a room has never once obliged a man to clear it. Ecclesiastes 7:8 commends the patient in spirit and never once commends the fast, and the Holy Spirit is the one in that room for the whole three minutes.

And then say out loud what the room is for. Just that. This is the garage. This is where the vehicle goes and where I work on things.

You have a word to put back tonight, and the name of a room has never once needed anybody else's permission to be spoken. It will feel ridiculous, and saying it anyway is the point, because the word is what changed first and the word is what changes back first. Ecclesiastes 7:8 points a man toward the end of a thing, and the Holy Spirit is the one standing on that floor while a plain sentence gets said.