Half The Things Here Do Not Work

There is a way you have to turn the door handle and everybody in this house knows it.

Up slightly, then round. Nobody was taught it. Everybody does it without looking, and when somebody visits they stand there rattling it and one of the children calls out from another room, because the visiting is the only time anybody remembers it is broken.

And it has been like that for about three years.

You could make a list. You have made it, mentally, more than once. The oven door that has to be held shut for the first ten minutes. The socket in the back bedroom that nobody uses and nobody has ever explained. The tap that drips unless you turn it a particular way. The washer that is on its second bad month. The freezer drawer that comes off its rail if you pull it out fully, so nobody pulls it out fully.

None of them are catastrophes. Every one of them is a thing you have adapted to.

And that is the part that has started to bother you, and it started bothering you at a specific moment. Somebody came over, and they went to open the oven, and you heard yourself say oh you have to hold that, and there was a small silence afterward.

And what you felt was not embarrassment exactly. It was closer to: how many of these are there now.

So let me be clear about two things before this article goes anywhere.

The broken things are real and they matter. I am not going to tell you they do not. A house where you have to explain five objects to a visitor is a house where somebody is spending energy every day on things that should cost nothing, and that is genuinely wearing.

And I am not going to make contentment your duty tonight. This is not an article that tells you to be grateful for a broken oven, or that a truly thankful person would not mind. You are allowed to mind. Minding is reasonable and it is not a spiritual failure.

What I have is one thing that is also true, and it has been true the whole time.

Better is a dry morsel and quietness

There is a proverb that puts two houses side by side, and what it compares is not what you would expect.

Better is a dry morsel, and quietness therewith, than an house full of sacrifices with strife. (Proverbs 17:1, King James Version)

Better is a dry morsel, and quietness therewith.

Look at the two houses.

The first has a dry morsel. Not a meal. A dry piece of bread, which is the least food a person could put on a table, and there is nothing else in the sentence about that house. No provision, no comfort, nothing working.

The second is full. A house full of sacrifices means meat, plenty, a full table, the appearance of everything going well.

And the proverb says the first one is better.

Now notice what makes the difference, because it is not the food and it is not the fittings. It is quietness in one and strife in the other. The whole comparison turns on what it is like to be in the room, and not on what is in the room.

That is a startling thing for scripture to say about a household, and it is said without qualification.

So here is what it means for your house tonight. The condition of the objects in it is not what the proverb measures. It does not appear in the comparison at all. A house with a door handle that has to be lifted and an oven that has to be held is not, on this measure, a lesser house. It might be the better one in the proverb, and it might have been the better one for three years.

And this is not an instruction to feel a particular way about it. The proverb is not commanding anybody to be content. It is stating what is actually better, and leaving it there.

What makes a house better has never once been the state of the things in it, and the proverb does not measure your oven. Proverbs 17:1 sets quietness with a dry morsel above a full house with strife, and the Holy Spirit is the one present in a room where a door handle has to be lifted and turned.

The adaptations are not a decline

Here is the practical half, and it is about how you have been reading that list.

You have been reading five adaptations as five pieces of evidence that things are slipping.

That is what happened when your guest went for the oven. In that half second the list assembled itself, and what it said was: this is a household that is gradually going down, and one day somebody will look around and see it.

But look at what those adaptations actually are.

Every one of them is a thing your family solved. Somebody worked out that the handle lifts. Somebody discovered the oven holds if you press it for ten minutes. Somebody found the angle on the tap. And then, without a single conversation about it, everybody in the house learned all five and nobody thinks about them.

That is not decay. That is a household that absorbs a problem and keeps going, which is a real capacity and most of what a family actually is.

And here is the part worth seeing clearly. Your children are learning something in that house, and it is not that things are falling apart. They are learning that when a thing breaks you do not stop living, and they are learning it from watching rather than being told, which is the only way anybody learns it.

That does not make the broken things good. They are not good. It costs money you would rather spend elsewhere and it will be a relief when the oven is fixed.

But the house is not in decline. It is being lived in, by people who have been quietly competent about it for three years.

Every one of those adaptations was something this household solved, and a house being lived in has never once been the same as a house going down. The written word puts quietness above a full table and says nothing about the fittings, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a family who absorb a problem and keep going.

Eat a meal in that room anyway

So here is the last assignment on this site, and it is deliberately in the wrong room.

Sit down in the room with the broken thing in it and eat a meal there anyway.

The kitchen with the oven you have to hold. The dining room with the light that does not work on one side. Whichever room you have been quietly avoiding using properly.

Eat there. Tonight or this week. Everybody at the table, with the ordinary food, and no attempt to make anything nice for the occasion.

And leave the broken thing broken. Do not fix anything first. Do not tidy in a way that hides it. Do not apologize for it if somebody is there.

The point is not to prove that you do not mind. You do mind, and I said that at the start.

The point is that you have been unconsciously waiting. Waiting until the oven is done to have people round. Waiting until the washer is sorted to feel that things are on top of it. Waiting for the list to be shorter before this house counts as a proper one.

Eating a meal in that room, with the thing still broken, ends the waiting. It is the most ordinary act in the world and it says something that no amount of thinking about it says: this is where we live, and we live here now.

And if somebody comes and goes to open the oven, tell them to hold it. Plainly, the way you would mention which cabinet the glasses are in. It is a fact about a house and not a confession about a family.

You are able to live in this house tonight rather than waiting for it, and a shorter list has never once been what made it count. Proverbs 17:1 puts quietness with a dry morsel above a full house, and the Holy Spirit is the one present at a table in a room with something broken in it.