On Desire

--This one is for Deborah, who earned it.

Sam and I have put my old house back on the market. The real-estate picture here in Washington shows some signs of slight improvement--things are selling, even if at rock-bottom prices. But there are buyers, compared to the last 4 years, during which time there have been only a handful of sales in the whole cluster of towns around us.

Of course, I want badly to sell the house. I loved living there, and in some ways, I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to live in it--to have the key in my hand and know that it was all mine, to paint it the bright colors I chose by myself, to make dinner in the kitchen and read on the couch in the living room until I wanted to go to bed and then to go upstairs to my bedroom and awaken there and walk through the house the next morning. I know this sounds weird, and maybe kind of selfish--it might read like the villain in this Sesame Street movie of Allison Clare's, who's bad because he keeps saying, "Mine! MINE!" But I loved the spaciousness of it, of living alone. I was lonely there, not only in that house, but in that stage of my life, and I will never forget that loneliness or the special anxieties of living as an adult single woman--not because it was scarring, but because it has become part of who I am that I know what that felt like. At the same time, though, there was a sense of possibility, of autonomy and self-determination, of the ability to choose to do what pleased me, that I will likely never have again.

I think that house represents a brief moment for me between being in the suspended state of student life and settling down so quickly and completely with Sam and the girls; that was the space I inhabited when I was most independent in my life, and I liked it. I don't really think about it, and I wouldn't trade my current life for it, but I want to honor it and be thankful for it.

Still, as I said, at this point, I am more than ready to sell the house, especially as the life that Sam and I share already feels like it absorbs us entirely. For a long time, I felt a sense of constant stress about the house and our need/desire to sell it. I worried about the slow hemorrhage of cash that the house represented, I worried about things going wrong, I worried about the fall in home values and the complete absence of buyers on the scene.

Lately, though, that has changed a bit. For one thing, Sam and I both feel like it's time to market the house aggressively for sale, and it feels good to be able to proceed with the plan instead of continuing to wait. But there's more to it. I also feel like I've somehow come to terms with my desire to sell the house. I used to feel almost panicked about it, the way I've felt at other times when my desire somehow outpaced my faith (in fact, that's almost how I would define a certain kind of anxiety: as the feeling that results from an excess of desire and a shortfall of faith). When I've been in that situation before, sometimes intensely and sometimes for years at a time, the advice I've always received in Christian circles is to trust in the Lord, to pray my desires to God and be set free.

I've realized it doesn't always work that way. At least, not for me. Instead, in the two situations that have lasted the longest and been the most stressful (the house being one), the resolution has meant something else entirely. I think that rather than surrendering my desires to God, I've somehow come to a point--and I believe that this too is the operation of grace--of surrendering myself to my desires, of living with the desire rather than being released from it. I feel all the desire without the anxiety, as if I knew that this particular thing were going to happen, and yet, I also know that it might not happen, yet that knowledge does not produce anxiety. (Somewhere, Deborah is reading this and praising the Lord. Thank you for the hundreds of hours that it took me to get here.) I'm not sure how to describe this state, exactly, or what the word is for it, but I am so, so glad to be here, even if only for this moment. I hope I can remember how to get back.