We Bought A House

So we bought a house this week.  

When I tell people that, they get all excited and congratulate me and ask me about the neighbourhood and what the house is like and all of that.  You know, the regular stuff people say to someone who just bought a house.  

It’s usually at that point in the conversation that I feel the need to clarify the story, just a bit.  When I say “we bought a house”, I mean, my wife Sarah and I bought a house.  

Along with our three kids.  

And my Mom.  

And my Dad.  

And my Sister.  

And my Brother-in-Law.  

And my Brother will live there too, when he’s home from school.  

Oh, and Sarah and I are in the process of adopting a fourth child. 

So yup, “we” bought a house.  

Together.  

And we’re all going to live in the house.  

Together.  

People usually aren’t real sure how to process this information.  I tend to hear a lot of variations on, “That’s so brave of you!” and “I’m glad it’s you, not me!”.  Some people opt for the, “Oh, that’s interesting,” coupled with a look of deep concern.  

Jokes about starting a cult are pretty common.  

And I get that, I really do.  

This is not how the story of success is supposed to go.  

I was supposed to go to school, get married, get a job, make some money, buy my own house and then sell that house to buy a bigger house and keep doing that until I’d earned enough equity to get my kids through college and retire by 65.  My generation, the Millenials, are mocked constantly for being the generation that never moves out of their parent’s basement.  I like to be a bit different, so I moved out and now I’m inviting my parents to move back in with me.  Or that’s how I’m spinning the story anyways.  

“That’s a lot of people” is a common response to our crazy plan.  It’s true. I’m sure there will be many moments when I wish I lived in a house with less people.  But right now I live in a house with only five people and there are still lots of days that I wish I lived with less people.  

Do you know how many people would need to live in my house for me to stop wishing that I lived in a house with less people?  

One.  

Me.  

But if I did manage to live all by myself, I’m 100% confident that I would be more lonely, more self-absorbed, more addicted and more unhappy than I am today.  I would also be less healthy, less productive, less generous, less patient, less accepting and less social.  At every point in my life so far, I have found that the challenges of sharing my life with other people have only served to form me into a healthier, happier human being.  So if I’ve seen that kind of benefit from living with five people, how much more will I personally benefit from living with ten?  

It was a couple years ago that I was reading the passage in Galatians 5 about the fruit of the Spirit; love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  I realized that all of those good attitudes and healthy behaviours were only ever evidenced through interaction with other people.  

I can say I’m a peaceful person but I don’t really know how peaceful I am until someone attacks me.  

On top of that, the only way I can develop those characteristics is also by interacting with other people.  

I learn to be more patient by spending time with people who try my patience.  

That’s it.  

So it may sound like living with a bunch of other people is a real sacrifice on my part, but honestly, I’m kind of counting on it turning me into an even more awesome person than I already am.  

“How will you fit everybody’s stuff in one house?” is another common question.  My guess is, we probably won’t.  There’s a limit on how many sets of dishes that one house needs, even for someone who’s as obsessed with dishes as my Dad.  

For a long time, I’ve always said that every street should have a community shed where there’s one snowblower, one lawnmower and one set of all the tools that the average person will need to care for their house and yard.  All those things are expensive, but most of us only use them occasionally.  Wouldn’t it make more financial and environmental sense to just share those things?  Why does our culture insist that every individual be entirely self-sufficient?   So this whole process is a chance for us to try and turn that concept into a reality on a smaller scale.  

But if that’s going to work, that means we’ll all have to get rid of some things.  Thankfully, Sarah and I had actually started that process months before we bought the house.  Back in January, we felt convicted that our life was becoming too full of “things” and that we should reduce the amount of stuff in our house by 25% by the end of the school year.  As part of our Lenten season, we’ve been trying to fill one bag, every day, with things that we can give away, re-sell or throw out.  

Our goal with moving into the new house is not to figure out how we can make everything fit but to use this process to help us determine what things we own are really important to us and what things we need to let go of.  

We aren’t engaging in minimalism just for the sake of having less clutter but as a way of ensuring that we possess our possessions instead of them possessing us. My hope is that when we move, every piece of furniture we load on the truck will have been discussed and debated and its presence and purpose in our new house justified as useful and life-giving.  

Plus, moving is awful.  So the less things I have to pack, the better.  

“So, whose going to pay for what”?  Ah yes, the money question.  People want to know if we’ll be saving money, how the budget will work, who is responsible for paying what and all that jazz.  The truth is, we’re not 100% sure of those answers either.  We have a plan in place and we’ve made some tentative budgets and we do know that we will all be building equity, and that’s good. But until we actually move in and start paying bills, we can’t know for sure exactly how its all going to shake out.  We also can’t be certain that everyone is going to stay employed forever, that there won’t be unexpected expenses that come up, that no one will want to move cities or that Luc won't run away with the Cabana boy.  

To me, that’s where trust and commitment and community come into play.  If at some point, one of us loses a job and there’s a couple months where one family doesn’t have the funds to make their full mortgage payment, are we going to kick them out?  Absolutely not.  In those seasons, I expect that everyone else will do their best to chip in and make up the difference.  By committing to doing this, we’re all taking a risk and every one of us could easily get burned by this arrangement.  

But isn’t every relationship that way?  

Isn’t true community about promising to be there for someone when they can’t make it work on their own?  

If the people around you can’t hurt you, the people around you can’t love you either.  

In doing this, we’ve all made ourselves vulnerable to each other.  We’ve shared our credit scores and our bank balances and our debt loads and all those sorts of scary things you’re not supposed to talk about.  

So far, I think the whole process has been a good warm up for when we all have to start seeing each before we’re showered and talking to each before we’ve had coffee.  

Much of the New Testament in the Bible is devoted to giving instructions about how people should live with and care for “one another”.  In those scriptures, there is a sense that life is supposed to be lived in community, where people share everything in common and take responsibility for caring for each other in the good times and the bad.  One need only read any number of Paul’s letters to see that this sort of communal life was often messy and difficult but it was also rewarding and powerful.  

One of the reasons that the early church grew so dramatically in the first four hundred years of its existence was that the life of the people in the church was so radically different than most of the Roman world around them.  People looked at those early Jesus’ followers and saw the way they cared for each other, saw their commitment to each other, saw their generosity and the vibrancy of their life and they wanted to be a part of that.  In some small way, I think that we’re hoping that our lifestyle choices can inspire other people towards a great sense of community, simplicity, generosity and trust.   

So yes, we bought a house.  But we bought it a little differently than most people and some of our reasons for doing so are a little bit different.  We like to think that different can be good.  Your path towards different may look different than ours. That’s good.  Our prayer is that our decision to buy a house, all ten of us, would in some small way, inspire you to have the courage to be different in your own way and in your own place.