But now that you have to move them all, you see with harrowing sobriety just how many things you own. You have drawers full of screws and bandaids, wrapping paper, stationery, light bulbs, winter clothes, electrical cables for appliances you've long since thrown out, but you keep them in case they belong to one of the items you still have.
There are items that you move around in your house, these are the things you thought about when you considered moving house. Things like your clothes that come and go from your wardrobe, or books you pick up and set down – these things stay at the forefront of your mind.
But as you pack up to move you realise you've laid a considerable foundation to your world, background objects of your sub-consciousness that only come up when someone asks "do you have an envelope?", "or some string?", "or a spare sleeping bag?". The answer is "yes", you have all those things.
It is this experience of relocating that gives you a brief glimpse into your roots, and the same is true in reverse. When you move into a new house, it is an exhausting process of settling everything back down again, fitting those obscure but one-day-important items into new cupboard spaces and storage areas.
But the comfort that I take from settling into a new place, is that all the effort I exert to make it mine is one thing I'll never have to do again. Pack your clothes into the new wardrobe and then they're there, put some photos up on the wall and they stay, connect your new internet plan and it's done. Making a house into a home is a long process of many steps, and as the weeks progress you lose track of all the changes you've made. Months later you are taking for granted that bookshelf you had to reassemble and that drawer everyone has of miscellaneous items that you once filled with blutack and rubber bands and superglue. Before long everything that caused so much lament on moving day is back in place.
But if you were only staying in your new place for a few months it would be hard to continue your work. As long as there is some end-goal and permanence that this is all working towards we can abide the menial frustrations. As long as each piece you put in place stays there and helps the next one, then you can maintain your patience for the task.
It's the same with our lives. It's very hard to persevere with something that doesn't seem to be going anywhere. We hate treading water. Even deferred purpose is difficult; learning an instrument can easily begin to feel like a waste of time. School can get mundane, but you only have to do it once and then it's in place. University can seem the same, but at least that's shorter. The frustration of learning the culture, skills, and processes of a new job only yields fruit in the long run. Even friendships and relationships fit into this mentality; who would endure the uncertainty of first encounters if there was no prospect of deeper relationship over time?
We long for permanence, for all of this to mean something and to be going somewhere. But the difficult tension of the gospel is that we are given more intransience than we could imagine, but also not quite as much as we'd like right now. Hebrews' closing exhortation includes the reminder: "here we do not have an enduring city". Whatever roots we put down and contributions we make to our future, we will always have an ephemeral relationship with the cities of this world. Abraham models this for us when "he went out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he stayed as a foreigner in the land of promise, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, co-heirs of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God". The permanence to come expresses itself in an impermanence here and now.
This is deeply practical. In my own life I need to find my stability in the right place. As I look to finishing my degree and finally getting on with "real life", I'm impatient to be doing something that's going somewhere, something that builds on itself. When I imagine moving out and starting to making a house with a culture and a purpose, I think "surely then I'll feel as though I'm progressing". Or as I think through relationships, I start believing that marriage will bring me constancy, to finally be building a home, developing a relationship, perhaps having kids and then I'll be at work on something that lasts, something of significance. But that's a lie. It's a misplaced value, a fleeting city, an idol.
It's the life equivalent of "when I'm finally moving into a new house that I'll be staying in, then I can be bothered with all these little tasks." As long as I can see my work building on itself then I'll be content, and until I do, I won't really try. But the promise of an enduring city to come means that here and now we live in tents. We may get married and we may have kids and establish ourselves in a beautiful house. But the person who has all those things should find as much permanence in them as the person who has none of them. They are a tent.
In the midst of whatever we consider to be our stability or transience, we are part of an altogether different story of permanence. In it all, we are working towards a goal, making contributions that do count and do accumulate to something of infinite value. We are pilgrims in tents, citizens of an enduring city, keeping our lives in proverbial boxes, and in everything, we are building on the progress of yesterday towards a goal that we will one day see is of unwavering permanence and unimaginable worth.
Sam Manchester is currently a theology student with an inescapable sociology degree behind him. In an attempt to reconcile the two, he reflects and writes about their coalescence in everyday life.
Sam's archive of articles may be viewed at www.pressserviceinternational.org/sam-manchester.html