I Said It Was Temporary

You said it was temporary in 2023, and you have not used the word since.

Not because anybody challenged you. Nobody has ever brought it up. You stopped using it on your own, because at some point in the second year you heard it in your own mouth and could not get it out again.

So now there is a thing in this house that everybody can see and nobody describes. The dining room has not been a dining room for two years and it does not have a name, and you all walk past the doorway and into the kitchen without mentioning it.

And the longer a thing goes unnamed the bigger it gets, which is the opposite of what you would expect.

I am not going to tell you to get premises or to stop, because that is advice and there is none of it on this site. I am going to talk about a proverb about tomorrow, and about why it is a mercy rather than a warning.

Boast not thyself of tomorrow

There is a short proverb about the future, and most people read it as a telling off. It is not one.

It is a statement about what a person can and cannot know, and the reason it gives is almost gentle.

Boast not thyself of to morrow; for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth. (Proverbs 27:1, King James Version)

You are not required to know how long this lasts, and you never were. Proverbs 27:1 takes the future out of a person's hands and puts the not knowing down as a plain fact, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that into a small dining room with afternoon light across the floor.

Read it as relief rather than rebuke. You do not know what a day will bring, which means you were never in a position to promise anybody that this was temporary in the first place.

The word temporary was a prediction, and it was made in good faith, and it was not yours to make. That is not a sin. It is simply information about what a person is able to say.

You have permission to stop predicting, and the honest word has never once been the pessimistic one. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a proverb about tomorrow reach a woman lifting crates out of a room that has no name, and Proverbs 27:1 removes the future from anybody's keeping without scolding them for having reached for it.

The word you cannot use

Let me say what happened to the word, because this is the part worth seeing clearly.

Temporary meant a few months. When it became a year, the word was already spent, and you could not say it again because nobody would believe it and because you no longer believed it yourself. So you stopped.

You were out of words and not out of honesty, and stopping has never once been the same as hiding. The Holy Spirit is the one who shows a woman what happened to her own vocabulary, and the written word takes tomorrow out of a person's hands in Proverbs 27:1.

And what is left is a family living in an arrangement with no description. Nobody can plan around it and nobody can object to it, because there is nothing there to object to. An unnamed thing is a thing nobody can get hold of.

The cost is not the room. The cost is that everybody in this house is living in something nobody will say out loud, and that is heavier than the room.

You are able to name this today, and naming it has never once been a defeat. His Spirit is the one who puts an honest description in a woman's mouth, and Proverbs 27:1 releases anybody from having to forecast how long anything will take.

Say what is true now

So here is the exercise, and it is two sentences and one room.

Say out loud, to whoever lives here, what is permanent and what is coming back. Not a prediction. A description of what is true now.

You are able to say what is actually true, and saying it has never once been a retreat. Proverbs 27:1 takes the forecasting out of anybody's hands, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes two plain sentences possible for a woman who has not used a word about this in two years.

The shape of it is this. The workroom is the workroom now and I am not calling that temporary any more. And the dining room is coming back, this week, and it stays a dining room.

Then give the second one back today. An honest description with nothing handed back is just a better worded problem.

You were never required to predict the future to be honest, and you are not required to now. The Spirit of God carries a woman past the silence that follows a spent word, and the written word puts the unknowability of tomorrow down as a plain fact in Proverbs 27:1.