I wrote this piece a week or so before we closed on our house, but Dave (husband) told me I couldn’t post it till after we were completely out of the house! đ Seriously, though, despite my awful thoughts during the selling process (which you’ll read about later in this post), we do hope and pray the very best for the new owners of our old home.Â
I wouldnât normally consider greed as one of my besetting sins.
But when we decide to move, and we begin the process of selling our homeâŚ
the green-eyed nasty comes out.
I get insulted by offers that are lower than the asking price; I want to quibble (I donât actually do it, but the impulse is there) over the inspection results; I begin to think of the homebuyers as âthose people.â
Case in point: Two weeks ago, when we got an offer on the houseâand it was a good one and such an answer to prayerâmy first response was greedy.
Dave, very excited, got off the phone with our realtor and turned to me. âWeâve got an offer!â
He was ready to rejoice, but I wanted to know the amount. He told me.
My first words?
âThat low?â
Dave wasnât even mildly surprised. He laughed and called me out. âYou get so greedy when we sell a house.â
Yes, I do.
And even though I try to fight it, itâs a constant all through the process. When the home inspection report from the city comes back, I say things like, âShouldnât the inspection report from when we bought the house have revealed this?â (What Iâm leaving unsaid are these words: ââŚso the previous homeowners could have paid for the repair?â) When, during this current home-selling process, we got the request from the owners to provide two working garage door remotes, I said, only partly joking (Iâm embarrassed to even admit this), âSomeone told me that if an automatic garage door opener isnât on the house listing, you can just unplug it and say itâs a manual.â Dave just stared at me after that one.
Every time this greed rises up like bile in my mind or actually vomits out my mouth, Iâm appalled, and I try to figure out where itâs coming from (as if it simply canât be a part of ME!); I pray about it; I try to talk myself out of it; I remind myself how really awful it is. After all, in this current sale, our home was on the market only two weeksâincredible!; the offer was good to begin with; when our realtor countered, the homebuyers accepted it; and their âfix-itâ requests have been minimal. Knowing all this, I ask myself, âJen, what is wrong with you?â
About a week after we sold our house, I was reading the novel Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (fantastic book, by the way) and I came to a line that was so good, so applicable, it made me stop and put the book down. The narrator of the book, John Ames, a pastor, is reflecting on the long, lonely years following the death of his young wife and their only child. In particular, he is remembering when, during that time of singleness, he christened his best friend’s child. He said the correct words, he blessed the child, but his inward thoughts were quite different.
ââŚmy heart froze in me,” he wrote, “and I thought, This is not my childâŚâ
The line that follows that statement is the one that made me set the book down.
âI donât know exactly what covetise is, but in my experience it is not so much desiring someone elseâs virtue or happiness as rejecting it, taking offense at the beauty of it.â
Oh.
Yes.
There is a grief in moving. I am leaving behind friends whom I love, neighbors whose stories Iâve learned, a house which has been a home, memories of Dave and I and our four children and our two international girls becoming a familyâŚ
âŚand there is a part of me that is flat-out jealous of the new homeowners. This right here is so good, I think, and what is ahead for us is so unknown that Iâm simmer-level jealous of these people who are moving into what we are sorrowfullyâthough willinglyâleaving behind.
I am, in John Amesâ words, taking offense at someone else moving into the happiness Iâve experienced here.
To be honest, I think thereâs a good dose of penny-pinching, old-fashioned, straight-up greed involved as well.
So confession is in order; repentance is in order; but also in order is acceptance of the forgiveness of God.
Because it is in times like this–when I see some of the twisted nature of sin, its stem reaching deep into self-focus, its branches weaving through hurt and fear–that I remember I need absolution from Another, that there is no way I can ever pluck something like this from out of my heart.
A few days after I read the passage in Gilead, I read a section of Accidental Saints by Nadia Bolz Weber, a Lutheran pastor, in which she was writing about this very thing. Forgiveness, she said, is not like a dry erase board that we are frantically trying to keep clean so God will be happy with us. Rather, it is freedom from the bondage of self, wrought for us by Christ, who is fully aware of our deep sinfulness, more aware than we ourselves are.
We need to know this truth about forgiveness, she says, and then she writes about the Maundy Thursday practice of individual absolution. In it she lays her hands on each congregantâs head and pronounces, âIn obedience to the command of our Lord Jesus Christ, I proclaim to you the entire forgiveness of all your sins, Amen.â
Jesusânot my efforts or repentanceâsets me free from my sins, so that I may, as the prayer of confession says, âdelight in (his) will, and walk in (his) ways, to the glory of His name.â
Amen!