The House Got Quiet One Person At A Time

Somebody asked you a question at a wedding and you have not stopped thinking about it since.

They asked how everybody was, and you gave the answer, and it was all true, and then in the car you noticed that the whole account had been a list of people doing things separately.

And after that you started running back through the last two years looking for the thing.

There was an event, surely. A row. A moving out. A season when somebody was ill. Something that explains why a house that used to be one noise is now four quiet ones.

You cannot find it. You have looked, on and off, for months.

And the not finding is worse than finding something would be, because a cause could be addressed and an absence cannot, and now there is a suspicion sitting underneath everything that whatever went wrong was you, and was gradual, and was invisible.

Let me take that off you at the start, because it is not true and it is doing damage.

There is no event. That is not a failure of your memory. Households do not usually go quiet because something happened. They go quiet the way a garden gets overgrown, which is by nobody doing anything in particular over a long enough period.

Take us the foxes, the little foxes

There is a line in the Song of Solomon that sounds decorative and is not.

Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes. (Song of Solomon 2:15, King James Version)

Nothing large is threatening that vineyard. No storm, no fire, no army, no drought.

Small animals. Several of them. Each one doing a small amount of damage in a place nobody is watching, and the cumulative result is a spoiled crop.

You are standing in a house that nothing went wrong in, and a slow quiet has never once required a cause worth finding. Song of Solomon 2:15 names small repeated things rather than one large event as what spoils a vine, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the hunt off a person who has been searching for two years.

And notice what the verse asks for, because it is not an investigation.

It does not say find out what happened. It does not say identify the fox that started it. It says take them, which is a present tense instruction about the small things currently in the field.

You have been asked for something much simpler than an explanation, and a person with no answer has never once been a person with nothing to do. The Spirit of God is the one who turns a search into an action, and it is written in the Song of Solomon that the instruction is to take the foxes and not to trace them.

Which is a relief if you let it be one, because you were never going to find the event, and now you do not have to.

You are released from an investigation that was never going to close, and two years of looking have never once been proof of anything hiding. It is written that the little foxes are what spoil the vines, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person stop digging and start doing.

What the little foxes actually were

Now let me name them, because they are unglamorous and you will recognize every one.

A late shift that became normal. A child who got a phone. A winter where everybody was tired. A television in a second room. A season of driving somebody to something four nights a week. One person going to bed earlier.

Not one of those is a problem. Several of them are good. Every single one of them is small, reasonable, and took about six weeks to become invisible.

You have a house that was eaten by ordinary weeks, and a quiet home has never once been evidence that anybody stopped loving anybody. The Spirit of God is the one who names the small things without turning any of them into an accusation, and Scripture puts the damage on the little foxes rather than on the vineyard keeper.

And here is why the verse is such good news for your particular situation.

Small causes take small answers. If a house went quiet through one large event, the repair would have to be the same size as the event. Nothing here is that size.

Twenty minutes in one room, repeated, is the same order of magnitude as the thing that caused it. It is a small repeated act against a set of small repeated absences.

You are able to answer this with something exactly its own size, and twenty minutes have never once been too small to work against something that arrived in twenty minute pieces. It is written that the vines have tender grapes, which is why the little foxes matter, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is unimpressed by how ordinary a solution looks.

So stop hunting. There is nothing to find and the finding was never the assignment.

You have been carrying a suspicion about yourself with no evidence attached, and a gradual quiet has never once been the fingerprint of a person. The Spirit of God is the one who lifts a private accusation off somebody at a wedding, and Song of Solomon 2:15 puts the whole cause on foxes nobody saw.

Put it in the calendar

Here is the instruction, and the calendar part is not decoration.

Put twenty minutes in the calendar for tomorrow. Twenty. Tomorrow. Written down somewhere real.

The reason it goes in a calendar is that everything else in this house is in one, and a thing that is not written down loses every argument with a thing that is.

You are able to put this on the same footing as everything else, and a written down twenty minutes has never once been a smaller commitment than an appointment. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present in something scheduled as much as in something spontaneous, and it is written in the Song of Solomon that the taking of the foxes is a job to be done rather than a mood to wait for.

And do not make it a series. Do not put in twelve weeks of it.

One entry. Tomorrow. Because a series is a promise and a single entry is a fox taken, and the verse asks for the second thing.

You have one small thing to do and no program to sustain, and a single entry in a calendar has never once needed the eleven after it to count. The Spirit of God is the one who works in one taken evening, and Scripture asks for the foxes currently in the field and says nothing about next spring.

Then tomorrow, when the twenty minutes arrives and you do not feel like it, go anyway. That is the entire assignment and there is not a second part.

You are able to keep a small appointment with your own household, and twenty minutes kept when nobody felt like it has never once been a lesser twenty minutes. It is written that the little foxes spoil the vines because the grapes are tender, and the Holy Spirit is the one at work in an evening nobody was in the mood for.