We Live Like Two Lodgers

He eats at six because of his shift. You eat at half past eight because that is when the youngest is finally down.

He watches his programs in the front room. You read in the kitchen. He is asleep by ten and you are awake until midnight, and on a Saturday he goes to his brother's and you go to your mother's, and both of you come home and say it was fine.

Nobody is angry. That is the thing that makes it hard to talk about. There is no conflict anywhere in the house. There is just an absence of anything shared.

And in the last year you have started using a word for it, privately, which is lodgers.

I am not going to tell you that word is unfair. It describes the arrangement accurately. You would be right to distrust anybody who pretended otherwise.

What I am going to say is that it describes the arrangement and not the fact, and I want to show you the difference, because I think it is where the relief is.

Two walking together

There is a question in Amos that is usually read as a warning and is actually just a question.

Can two walk together, except they be agreed? (Amos 3:3, King James Version)

Read what it assumes. It assumes agreement comes first and the walking follows from it. Not the other way round.

That is the ordinary way of things and everybody knows it in every other area of life. Two people agree to build a wall and then they build a wall. Nobody builds first and infers the agreement afterward.

You are two people already agreed and currently not walking much, and Amos has never once made the walking the proof of the agreement. Amos 3:3 asks whether two can walk together without being agreed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts the order of it back the right way round.

Now apply that to your fridge, with its two timetables on it. The two timetables are the walking, or the lack of it. They are not the agreement.

The agreement was made in front of God years ago and it has not been withdrawn by either of you. What has happened is that a shift pattern and a small child got in the way of the walking.

You have an agreement that is still standing under a house with no shared evenings in it, and the word has never once made a schedule into a covenant. The passage puts the agreement first and the walking second, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a person see which of the two has actually gone missing.

What is broken and what is not

Let me be honest with you, because a comfort that ignores the trouble is not worth having.

Something is genuinely missing in your house. I am not going to smooth that over. A marriage with no shared table and no shared hour is short of something real, and your instinct that it matters is correct.

But there are two entirely separate questions here, and they have been getting asked as one.

You are able to hold a real problem and a settled fact in the same hand, and Amos has never once made the walking the proof of the agreement. Amos 3:3 puts the agreement first and lets the walking follow, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates a timetable from a covenant.

The first is: is anything shared? And the honest answer at the moment is: very little.

The second is: are we joined? And the answer to that one is yes, and it has been yes for the whole of the thin year, and it will be yes on the days when nothing improves.

Confusing those two questions is what turns a logistical problem into a despair. A shift pattern can be worked on. A joining cannot be lost by a shift pattern.

You are joined during a year with nothing shared in it, and the word has never once made a shared evening the thing that holds a marriage together. Amos 3:3 has the agreement standing before any walking happens, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates a real problem from a false conclusion.

You were promised to and you promised, and a schedule has never once had the authority to undo that. It is written that two walk together because they are agreed, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a covenant standing while a household is badly organized.

Say it, and stop proving it today

Here is the assignment and it is small, and there is a stopping in it.

Say out loud, alone, in the kitchen: God joined this. He did it once and it holds.

Then stop trying to prove it today. For one day, do not audit the house. Do not count the hours the two of you spent in the same room. Do not compare the fridge to somebody else's.

Live in the arrangement for a day without prosecuting it.

You are able to hold the fact and the trouble in the same hand, and the fact has never once required the trouble to be solved first. Amos 3:3 puts the agreement before the walking, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a kitchen at half past eight while one person eats alone.

And then, another week, when you are rested, look at the timetable. Not today. Today is for the fact.