What Does Not Go in the Van

The tape gun has run out again, and she is standing in a stairwell that smells of other people's cooking, counting boxes with a marker pen between her teeth. Kitchen, four. Books, six. The box marked misc that has come through the last three addresses without ever being opened. The van is due at noon. This is the tenth address in twelve years and she has stopped writing the zip code on the boxes, because by the time the ink is dry it is somebody else's zip code.

Two neighbors are carrying a chair down past her, joking about the turn on the landing, and a man from the ground floor has propped the street door open with a brick so the whole block is one long draught. Somebody's radio is going. It is not a quiet morning. It is a morning full of people, and she is lonelier in it than she would be alone, because everybody in this stairwell is staying and she is the one who is going.

Then the girl from the flat below comes up the stairs with the reading book under her arm, the blue one, the one with the fox, and stops on the top step where they always sit. Every Thursday for a year. Nobody arranged it. The child simply arrived one Thursday with a book and a frown, and the woman with the marker pen sat down beside her, and that was that. The girl looks at the boxes and then at her and asks the only question in the building that matters.

"Who does Thursday now?"

And she has nothing to say. She has a van coming and a deposit she may or may not get back and no answer for a seven year old on a step. So she does the only thing she can do, which is sit down beside her on the concrete, and open the book, and the girl reads the whole page. Every word. Without a finger under the line, without a prompt, without looking up once. Then she looks up.

You know that step. You have your own version of it: the thing you have been quietly doing for someone in a life where nothing else stays put, and the day the boxes come and you find out what you were actually building. This is your stairwell. Sit down on it for a minute.

He did not appoint you to a zip code

Hear me. I am not going to tell you the moving is nearly over. I do not know that, and the ones who told you that before were guessing kindly. What I am going to tell you is what Jesus said the night before He died, in a borrowed room, to men who were about to be scattered to every address in the known world:

You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide.John 15:16

Look at the verbs. Chose. Appointed. Those are His. And then look at what He appointed them to: not a building, not a city, not a settled arrangement, but fruit that remains. He knew where every one of those men was going to end up, and it was nowhere. Peter would die in a city he did not grow up in. John would finish on an island he did not choose. Not one of the twelve got to keep a house. And He looked at that whole scattered future and said, the fruit stays.

You are appointed, right now, in a life that will not settle. That is not my thought over you. It is His word, spoken in that room and written down so a woman on a stairwell could read it two thousand years later, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it from the page into you. He appointed you to bear fruit that remains, and He did not attach an address to the appointment.

Now, the honest part, because you deserve the honest part before you deserve the lift. The ache under this is not really about the boxes. It is the sentence you have not said out loud: I would like one thing in my life to still be standing after I am gone, and I do not think anything will be, because I never stayed anywhere long enough to build it. You have watched people with one address for thirty years plant trees they will sit under. You have never planted anything you got to see grow. That is a real grief and I am not going to talk you out of it. I am going to show you where the fruit went.

The fruit was never in the boxes

Here is what happened on that step, and I want you to see it clearly, because it is what has been happening in your life while you were watching the moving van.

She did not build a house. She built a reader. Fifty two Thursdays, one page at a time, on a piece of concrete she does not own. And when the boxes came, the reader did not go in the van, because the reader was never hers to pack. The reader is a seven year old who now owns a thing nobody can move out of her. That is what fruit that remains looks like: it is a thing God grew through your hands into a person, and it goes where the person goes. Scripture calls it abiding fruit and the Spirit of God is the one who grew it, which is why it never needed your address to survive.

We think legacy is stone. It is not. Stone is what people build when they are afraid the fruit will not last. Look at what actually outlived the men in that upper room: not one wall, and every word. What Jesus planted in Peter went to Rome in Peter. What He planted in John went to Patmos in John. You are carrying the same kind of thing. The written word says He appointed you to it, and His Spirit is what makes it grow while you are busy looking for the tape gun.

And hear this, because the enemy of your soul would love you to miss it. Your provisional life is not a lesser life, and you are not wasting it. God has never once measured a life by what stayed on the shelf, and He is not starting with yours. The Spirit who appointed a scattered church to bear fruit is not embarrassed by a woman with a marker pen between her teeth. He put a whole world's harvest in the hands of people with no fixed abode, on purpose, and then had it written down so we would stop apologizing for the moving.

There is a fear that hides under all of this and I am going to name it, because a thing named in the light loses its grip. The fear is: nobody will remember I was here. Let me tell you what happens in a room when that fear meets the word of God. It goes quiet, and then somebody starts crying, because they realize they have been keeping the wrong ledger. God keeps His own, and His is not a list of buildings. It is a list of names.

You have been building into people for years, and the appointment that set you doing it never once mentioned an address. John 15:16 says He chose you and appointed you to go and bring forth fruit and to have that fruit remain, and it is the Spirit of God who makes an old sentence land in a stairwell that smells of other people's cooking.

If any of this ever turns dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and tell a doctor or a counselor the plain truth about the moving. Being established by God has never been a reason to face a hard stretch without a real person in the room.