A Tent Is Not An Insult

First light on the hill and the mist still lying in the hollow where the stream is, so that the top of the far ridge looks like an island.

Four of them came up. Two are ahead. His friend is beside him and they are going slowly because that is the arrangement now and nobody made a speech about it.

Forty-eight. Six years.

He can still do this one. Flasks in the pack, an hour up, sit at the top. There is a stone at the top that people sit on and it is worn where people sit.

Last month a man at his church, who is thoughtful and reads things, said the thing about the tent. He said it kindly. He said the body is a tent, you know, a temporary dwelling, we should hold it lightly.

And he has been chewing on it for a month, on and off, and it has done something he did not expect. Because he had never before had a word for the low thought that has been in him for six years, and now he has one, and the word is temporary.

If the body is a tent, then the whole of this, the physical therapy and the good days and the slow hour up the hill with a friend keeping pace, is maintenance on a thing that does not matter much. Camping equipment. Something you fold.

If somebody handed you a true word that made things worse, you know they were being thoughtful, and you know you have not told them what it did.

Read the second half of the sentence

The weight first and whole, because on this site the honest paragraph runs before the good one and it is never cut short to reach it.

What this costs is not the hill. It costs the meaning of the effort. Six years of work on a body is a great deal of work, and a word like temporary quietly reclassifies all of it as tidying. It costs you the good days, which stop being achievements and start being weather. It costs the slow hour, which your friend gives you every month without ever once making it a favor. And it costs you a month of chewing on a kind sentence you cannot give back.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your six years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, right here at the start: if temporary has settled somewhere darker than it should have, as far as thinking the three of them would get up this hill faster without you, tell one living person today. Your doctor, the friend keeping pace, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks no man to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who walk at your speed and do not mention it.

Now, the passage the word came from, and read all of it rather than the first clause.

For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven.2 Corinthians 5:1-2

Two structures, not one. That is the whole architecture of the sentence.

A tent, and a building. And Paul does not put the tent down in order to praise the building. He does something much more interesting: he says we groan in this one. Not we shrug in this one. Not we hold it lightly. Groan.

You are inside a passage that describes the tent as a place people groan in rather than a place people should be relaxed about. Second Corinthians 5:2 uses the word groan for exactly this, and the Holy Spirit is named four verses later as the earnest given to us for it.

Now the second half, which the man at church did not get to. He said temporary and stopped. Paul says a building of God, not made with hands, eternal. The tent is not being compared to nothing. It is being compared to something specific, built by somebody, permanent, and already existing, which is why he says we have it in the present tense.

You have a house already built and it is not on the same road as anything that wears out. That is written into 2 Corinthians 5:1, and His Spirit in you is the deposit that verse five names on precisely this.

And there is a phrase in verse four that a man on a hill needs. Not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon. Paul says explicitly that he is not asking to be rid of the body. He is asking for something to be put on over it. The whole point of his sentence is that stripping is not the hope.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because a month of thoughtful sentences has already been chewed over on this hill.

It says nothing about your six years or your seventh. It makes no promise about the hour up, or the stone at the top, or what you can still do next spring, and I will not make one, because what God does in your body now is His, in His own way.

And it does not say the man at church was wrong. Tent is Paul's own word and he was quoting it accurately. He stopped early, which is a different thing, and this site is not going to prosecute a thoughtful man for a half sentence.

You were never told to hold this lightly by anybody who wrote the passage. Scripture puts groaning in the tent and a building in the heavens in the same paragraph, and the same Spirit who is called the earnest is the one who carries both.