The Thirty-Seven Open Tabs of Houses I Will Never Buy
My wife asked me last night why my phone takes so long to open, and I made some excuse about the battery, when the real answer is that I am currently running thirty-seven open tabs of real estate listings in four different towns we have no plans to move to. A cabin with a wraparound porch two hours north. A fixer-upper on three acres I would never have time to clear. A brick colonial with a kitchen nicer than the one I already have, which I remodeled myself four years ago and was genuinely happy with until about six weeks ago, when I started doing this again. I do not call a realtor. I do not run the numbers with my wife. I just scroll, late, after she is asleep, collecting houses like a man building a raft out of driftwood he never intends to actually float.
I am thirteen years sober, and for a long time I assumed this particular restlessness had nothing to do with the thing I used to drink over. Drinking was an emergency. This is just browsing. But sitting with it honestly this week, I noticed the same old motion underneath it, a low hum that says wherever I currently am is not quite it, and somewhere else, something else, some other version of my life, would finally be enough. I used to chase that feeling with a bottle. Now I chase it with a search filter set to three bedrooms and good school district, and I am slowly admitting it is the same hunger wearing work boots instead of a drink in its hand.
Solomon ran this exact experiment with far more resources than a phone and a search bar, and he wrote down what he found at the end of it with a precision I recognize uncomfortably well. "Whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them. I did not withhold my heart from any pleasure, for my heart rejoiced in all my labor; and this was my reward from all my labor" (Ecclesiastes 2:10, NKJV). He built the houses instead of just browsing them, planted the vineyards, gathered the treasure, and for a while the having of it did feel like something. Then he looked back at the whole project with clearer eyes. "Then I looked on all the works that my hands had done and on the labor in which I had toiled; and indeed all was vanity and grasping for the wind. There was no profit under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 2:11, NKJV). Grasping for the wind is the most honest description of a midnight scroll through listings I have ever read, written three thousand years before anyone had a phone to do it on.
Here is where my own reasoning has never once closed a single one of those tabs. I can tell myself accurately that the house I have is paid for and good and full of twenty years of our actual life, that moving would cost more than it would ever give back, that the cabin two hours north would be a different set of problems wearing a prettier roofline. Every sentence is true, and none of it has ever once quieted the hum. That is because restlessness was never really a houses problem I could out-argue. It is an appetite, and Paul names the only diet that has ever actually fed it without widening it. "Now godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. And having food and clothing, with these we shall be content" (1 Timothy 6:6-8, NKJV). Contentment is called great gain, which means Paul is not asking me to settle for less. He is telling me where the actual profit was hiding the whole time, in a place none of my thirty-seven tabs were ever going to lead me.
Paul had lived both ends of this far more literally than I have, prison cells and provision both, and he says plainly it was not a fact he was simply born with. "I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound. Everywhere and in all things I have learned both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me" (Philippians 4:12-13, NKJV). Learned, not inherited. David describes the posture underneath that learning in a way that sounds almost impossible from where I sit with my phone glowing in a dark room. "Surely I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with his mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me" (Psalm 131:2, NKJV). A weaned child has stopped demanding something it does not actually need right now. That is not resignation. That is rest, and it is not a mood I can summon by willpower at eleven at night.
This is exactly what abiding in the Spirit gives that my own scrolling never could. Jesus does not tell the branch to manufacture its own sense of enough. He tells it to stay attached. "Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing" (John 15:4-5, NKJV). A branch does not go looking for a better vine when the fruit feels slow in coming. It stays where it already is, and the fruit it needed was never going to show up anywhere else. Paul lists what actually grows out of that staying, and peace sits right in the middle of it, not a feeling I argue myself into but something closer to fruit ripening on its own schedule. "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law" (Galatians 5:22-23, NKJV). And underneath all of it sits the promise that makes staying possible in the first place, that the hand holding the thing I already have is not going anywhere while I learn to trust it. "Let your conduct be without covetousness; be content with such things as you have. For He Himself has said, 'I will never leave you nor forsake you'" (Hebrews 13:5, NKJV).
I closed all thirty-seven tabs last night, one at a time, slower than it needed to take, and walked through my own kitchen afterward actually looking at it instead of past it, the counters I built with my own hands, the window over the sink my wife picked out. Nothing about my life changed in that five minutes. Something in my chest did. God is alive tonight, and He already knows exactly which listings you keep reopening, looking for the life that would finally be enough. He has a plan for you that was never hiding in a different town or a bigger kitchen, and He has told you Himself that He will never leave you to go on grasping for the wind alone.
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Scriptures used (NKJV): Ecclesiastes 2:10; Ecclesiastes 2:11; 1 Timothy 6:6-8; Philippians 4:12-13; Psalm 131:2; John 15:4-5; Galatians 5:22-23; Hebrews 13:5.
I am thirteen years sober, and for a long time I assumed this particular restlessness had nothing to do with the thing I used to drink over. Drinking was an emergency. This is just browsing. But sitting with it honestly this week, I noticed the same old motion underneath it, a low hum that says wherever I currently am is not quite it, and somewhere else, something else, some other version of my life, would finally be enough. I used to chase that feeling with a bottle. Now I chase it with a search filter set to three bedrooms and good school district, and I am slowly admitting it is the same hunger wearing work boots instead of a drink in its hand.
Solomon ran this exact experiment with far more resources than a phone and a search bar, and he wrote down what he found at the end of it with a precision I recognize uncomfortably well. "Whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them. I did not withhold my heart from any pleasure, for my heart rejoiced in all my labor; and this was my reward from all my labor" (Ecclesiastes 2:10, NKJV). He built the houses instead of just browsing them, planted the vineyards, gathered the treasure, and for a while the having of it did feel like something. Then he looked back at the whole project with clearer eyes. "Then I looked on all the works that my hands had done and on the labor in which I had toiled; and indeed all was vanity and grasping for the wind. There was no profit under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 2:11, NKJV). Grasping for the wind is the most honest description of a midnight scroll through listings I have ever read, written three thousand years before anyone had a phone to do it on.
Here is where my own reasoning has never once closed a single one of those tabs. I can tell myself accurately that the house I have is paid for and good and full of twenty years of our actual life, that moving would cost more than it would ever give back, that the cabin two hours north would be a different set of problems wearing a prettier roofline. Every sentence is true, and none of it has ever once quieted the hum. That is because restlessness was never really a houses problem I could out-argue. It is an appetite, and Paul names the only diet that has ever actually fed it without widening it. "Now godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. And having food and clothing, with these we shall be content" (1 Timothy 6:6-8, NKJV). Contentment is called great gain, which means Paul is not asking me to settle for less. He is telling me where the actual profit was hiding the whole time, in a place none of my thirty-seven tabs were ever going to lead me.
Paul had lived both ends of this far more literally than I have, prison cells and provision both, and he says plainly it was not a fact he was simply born with. "I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound. Everywhere and in all things I have learned both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me" (Philippians 4:12-13, NKJV). Learned, not inherited. David describes the posture underneath that learning in a way that sounds almost impossible from where I sit with my phone glowing in a dark room. "Surely I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with his mother; like a weaned child is my soul within me" (Psalm 131:2, NKJV). A weaned child has stopped demanding something it does not actually need right now. That is not resignation. That is rest, and it is not a mood I can summon by willpower at eleven at night.
This is exactly what abiding in the Spirit gives that my own scrolling never could. Jesus does not tell the branch to manufacture its own sense of enough. He tells it to stay attached. "Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing" (John 15:4-5, NKJV). A branch does not go looking for a better vine when the fruit feels slow in coming. It stays where it already is, and the fruit it needed was never going to show up anywhere else. Paul lists what actually grows out of that staying, and peace sits right in the middle of it, not a feeling I argue myself into but something closer to fruit ripening on its own schedule. "But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law" (Galatians 5:22-23, NKJV). And underneath all of it sits the promise that makes staying possible in the first place, that the hand holding the thing I already have is not going anywhere while I learn to trust it. "Let your conduct be without covetousness; be content with such things as you have. For He Himself has said, 'I will never leave you nor forsake you'" (Hebrews 13:5, NKJV).
I closed all thirty-seven tabs last night, one at a time, slower than it needed to take, and walked through my own kitchen afterward actually looking at it instead of past it, the counters I built with my own hands, the window over the sink my wife picked out. Nothing about my life changed in that five minutes. Something in my chest did. God is alive tonight, and He already knows exactly which listings you keep reopening, looking for the life that would finally be enough. He has a plan for you that was never hiding in a different town or a bigger kitchen, and He has told you Himself that He will never leave you to go on grasping for the wind alone.
---
Scriptures used (NKJV): Ecclesiastes 2:10; Ecclesiastes 2:11; 1 Timothy 6:6-8; Philippians 4:12-13; Psalm 131:2; John 15:4-5; Galatians 5:22-23; Hebrews 13:5.
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