The Sparrow Found a House

She could not tell you the last time she saw the whole surface of that table.

There is her daughter's post, because that address is still the one on half of it. There is a box of things belonging to her son that has been there since he moved and has not been opened. There is the folder for the car, the folder for the boiler, two library books that are overdue, a bag of somebody else's washing, and a lamp that has needed a new flex since spring.

She wipes a corner of it four times a day to put a cup down.

And what has been sitting on her for months is not really the mess. It is a memory. There was a time in her life when that table was clear, and she would sit at it in the morning with her Bible open and the whole width of it in front of her, and it was the best half hour of her day for about eleven years.

Now she thinks about doing that and looks at the box and the folders and the flex, and thinks: not today, and probably not this week, and by Thursday she has stopped thinking about it at all.

That is your table. That is your corner. And I want to say something to you, because there is a psalm with a small bird in it that settles the whole question of size.

The bird on the altar

The psalmist is homesick for the temple, and in the middle of describing it he notices something nobody would have put in a hymn.

Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, even thine altars, O Lord of hosts, my King, and my God.Psalm 84:3

Even thine altars.

A sparrow, which is the least impressive bird available and the one Jesus later prices at two for a farthing, has built a nest on the altar itself. Not near it. On it.

Nobody chased her off. The psalmist does not report it as a scandal or an untidiness to be corrected. He reports it as something enviable: the smallest and least significant creature in the building has made an ordinary domestic home in the holiest place there is, and is raising her young there.

You have a small ordinary place that God calls His. Not a poor substitute for the half hour you used to have. The written word puts a nest on an altar and lets it stand, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a woman who wipes a corner four times a day.

Now let me say something about the box and the post and the flex, because the pile has quietly become a moral matter.

It is not. It is a woman holding other people's lives on her table because she is the kind of person other people leave things with, and that is not a failure of order, and it has nothing whatever to do with whether God will meet you.

You are not disqualified by an untidy table. The written word does not make the state of a surface a condition of anything. The Holy Spirit has been in that kitchen four times a day while you wiped a corner for a cup.

And now the actual ache, which is not the mess either.

It is that you had eleven years of something and you think you have lost it, and that what is available now is a lesser thing, and a lesser thing feels worse than nothing.

You are not being offered a downgrade. Even thine altars, and the sparrow's nest was not a reduced version of the temple; it was a whole home in the middle of it. The Holy Spirit is not comparing this week to 2014.