Repacked Every Season

It is the first cold Saturday of the autumn, so the bag comes out from under the coat hooks and goes onto the hall floor, and everything in it comes out onto the boards in the order it went in.

He does this twice a year. Once when the clocks go back and once when they go forward. The canvas has gone soft at the corners the way canvas does. Out comes the folded fleece, out come the two pairs of socks rolled into each other, the flashlight, the spare batteries in their plastic sleeve, the phone charger with the tape on the cable, the small bag of hard candies for the children which he changes every time because he will not have them go stale, the plastic wallet with the copies in it. He kneels on the hall floor and lays it all out in a row like a man doing an inventory, and he checks the batteries in the flashlight by shining it at his own hand, and then he swaps the fleece for the heavier one and packs it all back in the same order, and stands the bag back under the coats.

It takes eleven minutes. He has never timed it. I am guessing.

Nothing has come for that house in eleven years. Nothing is coming for it now. The street outside is the kind where somebody's grandmother waters the pots on the wall, and the loudest thing that happens on it is the recycling truck on a Tuesday. His wife walks past the bag forty times a day and stopped mentioning it a long while ago, not because it bothers her, but because it does not, and there is nothing to mention.

Here is the part he has never said out loud to anyone. He cannot go away for a weekend without setting that bag by the door first. Even though he is the one leaving. Even though the house will be empty. He sets it down under the hooks, and then he can pick up his own case and go.

There is something in your hallway too.

I do not know what it is and I am not going to guess, because it is not mine to guess and guessing at a person's history is how a stranger does harm from a distance. It might not even be a thing you could point at. But you know the feeling of doing a small careful task on a Saturday for a leaving that is not coming, and you know the particular loneliness of not being able to say why, and you know that nobody who loves you has ever once thought less of you for it.

I am not here to get the bag out of your hallway. I am here to read you two things. One is a night when God Himself told His people to eat their dinner with their shoes on. The other is what Moses said, at the very end, to a people who were about to sleep under roofs for the first time in forty years.

There was a night when the shoes were the obedience

Before anything else, hear this: the packing was never the sin, and I will not have you carrying that.

There was one night in the history of God's people when standing ready to leave was the exact thing He asked for. Not a nervous habit. An instruction, given by name, with a menu attached.

And thus shall ye eat it; with your loins girded, your shoes on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and ye shall eat it in haste: it is the LORD's passover.Exodus 12:11

Read it as the household would have heard it. Belt on at the table. Shoes on indoors. Staff leaning against your own knee while you eat. Everything about that room said: we are going, and it is tonight. And they were right, and it was that night, and by morning a whole nation was on a road it had never seen.

That is not a mood I am putting on you. Exodus 12 records the instruction and it records the one night it was issued for, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can tell a body the difference between then and now. You were obedient in a season that has ended, and obedience does not become foolishness just because the season closed behind it.

So when your hands lay a flashlight and two pairs of socks out on the hall floor in a row, they are not being faithless. They are being loyal to an old order that was, at the time, exactly right. The order has been fulfilled. The night came and went and the sea opened and the people walked. You have a body that learned something true and kept it past its date, and His word never once calls that unbelief, and His Spirit is not standing in your hall with a clipboard waiting for the bag to go.

Underneath, which is the direction a man braces about

Now the other passage, and I want you to notice who it was spoken to.

Moses is at the end. He blesses the tribes one by one, and in the middle of it he says a sentence to a people who have spent forty years with everything they own designed to be carried, tent pegs and poles and rings and staves, a whole nation whose furniture was built to be picked up at short notice.

The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.Deuteronomy 33:27

The word under refuge is a dwelling word. It means a lair, a den, the place a creature goes back to and does not have to defend. Moses does not say God will find them a house. He says God is the house. And then he puts the arms in the only direction that matters to a body that is braced.

Underneath. Not around you, which would be comfort. Not above you, which would be cover. Under. Because the thing a braced body is actually asking, every single time, is whether the floor holds. That is what the hallway question is. It is not really about a flashlight. It is about whether the ground under this life is the kind that gives way, because it gave way once.

I am reading, not inventing: Deuteronomy 33 puts the arms underneath, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes underneath a floor a man can stand on rather than a fine sentence in an old book. You are standing on arms that were there before the boards were laid, and they were not put there in response to your bracing.

And notice what Moses does not say. He does not say the people will stop reaching for their staffs. He does not promise them a generation without alarm. He tells them where the floor is and he leaves them to live on it. His word does not put your rest on the far side of your reflex, and His Spirit is not withholding the arms until the hallway is clear.

One plain thing, folded in here because I would rather say it than leave it out. If what stands in your hallway is heavier than a bag, and the nights have been going somewhere dark, tell one human being today, and if there is any danger in it, reach the crisis line where you live and let a real voice stay with you. Reaching for a person is one of the ordinary things a free man does.