I Measured My House Against Theirs

You came in through your own back door and looked at your own kitchen and it had changed while you were out.

Nothing had changed. Everything was where it was at four o'clock. But you were seeing it through about two hours of somebody else's, and the light in it looked different, and you noticed the corner by the window that you have not thought about in three years.

And then you were quiet for the rest of the evening, and somebody asked whether you were all right, and you said you were tired.

I am not going to say anything about their house. It was a good house and they were good to you and that is the whole of what I know about it.

And I am not going to tell you your house is lovely, because I have not seen it, and a stranger being warm about a kitchen he has never stood in is worth nothing to anybody.

The lines are fallen unto me

There is a line in Psalm 16 that comes out of a surveying practice, and knowing that changes the whole thing.

The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage. (Psalm 16:6, King James Version)

The lines are the measuring cords used to mark out a piece of ground. When land was divided, lots were cast and the cords fell where they fell, and a family got what the cord gave them.

So the sentence is about an allocation that the person did not choose. He is not describing a plot he picked. He is describing where the line landed.

You have a place that fell to you rather than one you selected, and the falling of it has never once been your own arrangement. Psalm 16:6 says the lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that into a kitchen at nine in the evening.

And then he says pleasant. That is a judgment about the ground he was given, made by him, out loud, without any reference to what fell to anybody else.

That is not a man who got the best plot. Psalm 16 is written by somebody with real enemies and real trouble, and the pleasant is a verdict he issues rather than a fact he observed.

You are able to call your own ground pleasant, and that has never once required it to be the best ground anybody got. It is written in Psalm 16:6 that the lines fell in pleasant places and there is a goodly heritage, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a person say that about their own plot.

What actually changed at nine o'clock

Now let me say plainly what happened when you came in, because it will help to have it named.

Your kitchen did not change. Your eyes changed, and they changed because they had been calibrated for two hours against a different room, and calibration is not perception.

Anything looked at through a fresh comparison looks worse for about a day. That is true of houses, cars, faces and lives, and it fades on its own by about Wednesday, and everybody knows this and nobody can feel it on the night.

You are looking through borrowed eyes rather than at the truth, and borrowed eyes have never once returned an accurate reading. It is written in Psalm 16:6 that the lines fell in pleasant places, and the Spirit of God is the one who resets a look that got calibrated somewhere else.

Psalm 16:6 has a man issuing a verdict about his ground rather than measuring it against the next field, and the Holy Spirit is the one who resets what two hours in another house recalibrated.

You are looking at the same room you left, and two hours in another kitchen has never once changed a single thing in yours. Psalm 16:6 issues a verdict rather than taking a measurement, and the Holy Spirit is the one who resets an eye that has been calibrated against somebody else's.

And here is the plain thing, because the quiet evening turned into something.

That is not a verdict. It is not a score, it is not a grade, and it is not evidence about the life being lived in your house.

It is a person coming home with borrowed eyes, which happens to everybody who ever visits anybody.

You have not been shown the truth about your own house, and a recalibrated eye has never once produced a fact. The written word calls the ground pleasant by a decision in Psalm 16:6, and the Spirit of God is the one who declines to certify what a person saw at nine in the evening.

A goodly heritage

One more thing about the second half, because heritage is not a word about property.

Yea, I have a goodly heritage. A heritage is what is handed down and what will be handed on, and it is made of people rather than of rooms.

That is what your kitchen actually is. Not a comparison item. A place where a specific set of people eat and argue and put things down and pick them up, and where somebody put a mark on the door frame in 2019.

You are standing in a heritage rather than in a set of rooms, and no visitor has ever once been able to see the difference. It is written in Psalm 16:6 that there is a goodly heritage, and the Spirit of God is the one who counts the people in a room rather than the fixtures around them.

None of that is visible to a visitor and none of it was visible in the other house either, which is exactly why two hours there told you nothing.

Psalm 16:6 counts the heritage rather than the fixtures, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is in a door frame with a mark on it.

You have a heritage in that house rather than a set of rooms, and none of it has ever once been visible to a visitor. Psalm 16:6 says I have a goodly heritage, and the Holy Spirit is the one who counts a mark on a door frame that nobody else would notice.