Things Not Seen

Our realtor called the sale sight-unseen, which sounded biblical. He had international clients who wanted to get under contract before moving to Mississippi from Germany, and from the pictures he had shown them, they thought our house would work just fine. They were even willing to pay the asking price. Then he hit us with a second term —dual agency— which meant he would be representing both us and the buyers. I guess another way of saying it was that he was serving two masters. That also sounded biblical, but not in the comforting way.

We should have seen red flags waving out every window, but any alarms were drowned out by the beautiful song I kept humming to myself: We are under contract. At the time, I was spending my days at home with three very young children. Andrew was commuting an hour away for his final semester of seminary. And with no family in town to drop by and help, we were preparing to move to Georgia. I’d spent weeks dreading the thought of keeping my house spotless and show-ready, wrangling kids out the door every time a stranger wanted to wander through my bedroom. So when the house went under contract—at asking price, without a single showing—we called friends over to celebrate and clink glasses, believing the hard part was behind us.

The day before closing, we were living in the last-minute mess that comes with any move. Most of our furniture was already loaded onto the 18-wheeler parked in front of our house. Andrew was taking his final exams in Jackson. I was packing boxes, which were immediately unpacked by my children. Movers were in the kitchen, digging through the backs of cabinets to pull out old cake pans I had forgotten existed. The floors were covered in a chaos of packing paper, duct tape, broken bits of toys, and piles of things that should have already been taken to Goodwill but would now likely end up in the dumpster.

Life did not stop just because were were moving; it was May, after all. Our kindergartner had an end-of-the-year event at school I didn’t want to miss that morning. So after successfully taping off one box before anyone could unpack it, the kids and I loaded up in the van. The house I left behind looked as any house would in the throes of an interstate move with three babies and a countdown closing in: it looked like the people in it didn’t know how to live right.

So picture this: There I was on the school playground with a baby on my hip, when I got a call from our realtor’s office.

“The buyers will be there in thirty minutes for a walk-through,” the secretary said casually—as casually as if she were reminding me of a hair appointment a week in advance.

Walk-through? In thirty minutes? I stood blinking, speechless. I guess I should have considered the possibility, but I had definitely not considered the possibility. And now there was not a single thing I could do about the fact that these buyers were about to walk through a house—their house in two days—which looked like it had been taken over by squatters. If I left the school right then, I would only get there in time to watch their faces contort in disgust. I was mortified. I didn’t yet realize I ought to be afraid.

I should have been afraid, because what came next was one of the most quietly devastating moments of my life.

The office called again: “The buyers are pulling out. They say the house doesn’t look like the pictures.”

Oh, really? Not like the pictures? No, of course it didn’t. The pictures didn’t include our real lives spilled out all over the floors. They didn’t show what remains after you move a sofa from the spot it had been roosting for six years. (AA batteries, a Nerf bullet, two puzzle pieces from two different puzzles, stale cheerios, a purple marker, a paper menu from Jutamas Thai Restaurant.) The pictures didn’t show clumps of dust, or last night’s pajamas, or toothpaste crust. They couldn’t capture that particular smell that comes from trying to eat through all the perishables in your refrigerator. They didn’t show the evidence of two little boys who were still learning to aim for the toilet. This sight-unseen purchase was now fully beheld, indecent and shamefully exposed.

Our double-agented realtor was no help. In fact, he was out of the country on vacation and couldn’t be reached. His office gave a little shrug like, “Gosh, that stinks.” I was blind with anger, blind with grief—and I had a gnawing fear that I couldn’t yet name.

Andrew made it home from Jackson and we sat on the front porch together, which meant we had a front-row view of the moving truck that now felt like a billboard of mockery. This porch, where we had hoped to spend a final, reflective night together, now felt like a place from which we would watch the sky fall. We didn’t know how we were going to pay two house bills next month. We didn’t know where we’d find a new buyer. And we did not ever want to talk to our realtor again.

To let people know what was happening, Andrew called a couple friends. If you’ve lived in Mississippi, you’ll know that’s all it takes in a crisis. Calling two people sets off a kind of legendary phone chain that spreads as fast as fire on dry pine straw. Everyone who needs to know will know within the hour, and I mean that in the best possible way. Almost immediately, an elder from our church materialized in the driveway. He sat down on the porch steps beside Andrew, who now had his head in his hands.

I wandered back inside and sank down onto the bedroom floor, needing a quiet place to process. My phone rang. It was Sara, our pastor’s wife.

“I just heard what happened,” she said. I didn’t need to ask how. There was a crack of a bat behind her, the roar of a stadium. I realized she was at one of her kids’ baseball games; she was almost shouting. “Are you okay?”

”No,” I choked out, “What if we can’t make the payments? What if we have to foreclose?”

“The body of Christ would never let that happen.” she said. And she said it with such authority, such calm conviction—like she was pointing at the moon and calling it the moon.

But now I was surprised to find that a new fear had raised its head, one that hadn’t even occurred to me until that moment. It slithered toward me like it had been hiding under the words I had just handed to Sara, and I whispered it to her over the phone— “What if we fall through the cracks? What if we’ve slipped out of God’s sight?”

“You will not fall through the cracks,” she said. Hearing her say it with such certainty made something inside of me sit up a little straighter. She answered me like someone who had already wrestled that fear to the ground herself and demanded a blessing. Sara’s reassuring voice was exactly what I needed. I didn’t need pity, I didn’t need empathy — I had gone blind and I needed someone else to do the seeing.

Sure enough, the church did become the net beneath us as we fell. We were not forgotten. A young family took us to dinner that night. Some lawyer friends offered to deal with that realtor. Another friend found us a new buyer by the end of the week. Everything turned out okay, of course.

But, of course, not everything always does turn out okay. Sometimes people do foreclose on homes. Sometimes marriages end. Sometimes unemployment lasts for months. Sometimes, like Sara, you get cancer.

This week, Sara faced another exhausting round of chemo to deal with the cancer her body’s been fighting over the past four years. I was asked by a friend to choose a phrase from the 23rd Psalm to pray and speak over Sara as she suffers from the effects of chemo this week. I knew right away which line I’d choose:

Surely goodness and mercy will follow you.

This is essentially what she said to me when I wasn’t so sure that goodness or mercy even knew where to find me. No one would be surprised or disappointed in Sara if she were asking the same questions— Could I fall through the cracks? Could God’s goodness and mercy find me even here? But that word—surely— isn’t a flimsy hope. It means that for God’s children, our only possible reality is one in which His goodness and mercy are at our heels.

Sara’s husband, our former pastor of six years, once said something like this in a sermon. He said we could imagine those two characteristics of God—Goodness and Mercy— as sheepdogs, rounding us up when we wander, dragging us up out of ditches, nipping at our heels and herding us forward to our Good Shepherd who has prepared a place for us.

Photo by James McGill on Unsplash

But the Christian life is a kind of sight-unseen arrangement. We trust what we can’t yet touch, we hope for things we haven’t fully seen. It’s no wonder we have our seasons of doubt; It’s no wonder some of us ask hard questions. But in turns, and at different times, we fellow believers might catch glimpses of this Far Country— the clouds will part and there it is: luminous, steady, fixed as the moon. Sometimes I’ll need you to call it out with confidence. Sometimes, you’ll need me to do the same.

So, Sara— Let me give your own words back to you: You can not fall through the cracks. Our Shepherd will make sure that we both get all the way Home. His loyal sheepdogs, Goodness and Mercy, will follow you. Yes, even there. You helped me to wrestle that fear to the ground all those years ago. Now I believe it enough to say it back to you.