The House Was Loud and He Misses It

Kai eats standing up. He has noticed this about himself and has decided not to examine it.

The house he grew up in had between nine and fourteen people in it depending on the year, and it was never quiet, not once, not at any hour. There was somebody in the kitchen at midnight and somebody on the porch at five. The television was on for eleven years straight. His grandmother's radio was on top of that. If you wanted to be alone you went and sat in a truck.

He left in October. He is thirty-three, and the reasons were an arrangement about money and land and who was expected to give up what, and it had been going for a long time, and when it finally came apart it came apart badly. Two of his uncles have not spoken to him. His mother has, and does, and calls him every Sunday, and cries about half the time.

He has a small place now, forty minutes away. Two bedrooms. His own.

And he cannot eat sitting down. He makes food and he stands at the counter with the plate and he eats it in about six minutes and he washes up, and the whole thing is over in nine, and then the evening is there.

The one time he set a place at the table properly, in November, with a plate and a glass and a napkin, he got about three bites in and had to get up.

Here is the day it caught.

His cousin came by, first one to visit, and they sat on the step and ate takeout out of the boxes, and afterward his cousin said, "That was the loudest hour you've had in a while, huh."

And Kai laughed and said, "You've got no idea."

And after his cousin left, the house went back to what it is, and Kai stood in the kitchen for a while not doing anything.

You know that ache. You left something crowded, correctly, at real cost, and it turns out the crowd was also the good part, and there is a table now with nobody at the other end of it.

What the Preacher actually warns against

Let me put down what I am not doing tonight, so you can stop bracing.

I am not going to tell you to go back or to make it up with your uncles or to hold out. I do not know your family and I am not going to hand a man a plan for his own relatives from behind a screen. I am not going to tell you how long the evenings stay like this.

What I will do is read you a verse that gets used as a rebuke and show you what it is actually aimed at.

Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this.Ecclesiastes 7:10

Now, that verse gets swung at people who miss things, and it is a bad swing, because look closely at what the Preacher forbids.

He does not say: do not remember the former days.

He does not say: the former days were not better.

He says: do not ask what is the cause that the former days were better than these. He is naming a specific mental activity, which is the running of a comparison, over and over, in order to produce a verdict about the present.

That is a different thing from missing something. Missing is a feeling about what was. The comparison the Preacher warns about is an argument about what is, and it is an argument nobody ever wins, because the past is finished and can be edited and the present is unfinished and cannot.

You are not under a warning for missing what was loud, and the Preacher aims at the comparison rather than at the memory. Ecclesiastes 7:10 forbids the asking rather than the remembering, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that distinction off the page and into a kitchen where a man is standing up eating.

And there is a mercy in why the comparison is unwise. It is unwise because it is unanswerable. There is no piece of information Kai could obtain that would settle whether the loud house was better. The question has no available answer, and a mind that keeps asking an unanswerable question at seven in the evening is not being disloyal, it is being tortured.

You have been asking a question with no answer in it, and the verse takes that question off you rather than adding a rule. It is written that a person does not enquire wisely concerning this, and the Holy Spirit is what makes a released question feel like relief instead of a scolding.

The crowd was the good part

Now let me be careful, because this is where a message like this goes wrong.

I am not going to tell Kai that the noise was a distraction and the quiet is God's better plan. Maybe it will be. But said to a man in month eleven who cannot sit down at his own table, that sentence functions as a demand that he like something he does not like yet.

Here is the true shape of it. He left an arrangement. The arrangement lived inside a house. The house was full of people he loves. When he left the arrangement, he lost the house, and losing the house cost him the people, and none of that was a mistake and all of it was a loss.

You are permitted to count the crowd as a genuine loss, and nothing in Scripture requires a person to pretend that what they left had nothing good in it. Ecclesiastes 7:10 never once claims the former days were worse, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps an honest accounting from being read as regret.

And here is the specific thing about standing up to eat. It is not a symptom to be fixed. It is a man avoiding an empty chair, which is an entirely rational thing to do, and it will stop when it stops.

You are not doing anything wrong at that counter, and there is no verse anywhere that legislates how a man eats his supper. 1 Corinthians 10:31 says whatever you do, do all to the glory of God, standing or sitting, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps a habit from being turned into a diagnosis.

Say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If the evenings have gone somewhere darker than lonely, or if the falling out with your uncles left something you have never looked at squarely, do not carry that alone. Tell somebody this week. Your mother on the Sunday call, your cousin, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is not me telling you a thing about your family. That is me refusing to leave you standing in that kitchen by yourself.