The Damp on the Bedroom Wall

She takes it from the same angle so they can compare, which is a thing she worked out herself and which nobody told her to do.

Corner of the small bedroom, above the skirting, going up. It is black and it has a shape she could draw from memory. There is a strip of wallpaper that has stopped being attached to anything.

Fourteenth report.

She has a folder. She has reference numbers. She has a note of the name of every person she has spoken to and the date, because the fourth time she rang, a man told her there was no record of the previous three, and she has never trusted the system since and she was right not to.

Her youngest coughs. He has coughed since about November and the doctor has been kind and has written a letter which she has also photographed.

Eighteen months ago she went to a meeting. It was a good meeting and she is not going to be sneering about it, because she cried at it and she meant it. And a man prayed over her and said, with real warmth, that she should speak over that house, that there is power in the tongue, that things would shift.

So she did. Every day for about four months, standing in that doorway. Then most days. Then, in the way things go, less.

And this morning she is taking photograph fourteen and the shape on the wall is bigger than it was in the first one and she has both pictures on her phone and has compared them, which she wishes she had not.

If you have been told to speak over something and then watched it grow, you know that doorway. And you know the sentence underneath, which is worse than doubt: he said things would shift, and they did not, and there are only two explanations and one of them is about me.

What He said first, and what people quote

Let me stand in the doorway with you and say the plain thing, because you have been carrying it since about month five and you have not said it to anybody at that church.

The wall is not the injury. The wall is a landlord and a system and it is exhausting and it is not, in itself, a spiritual crisis. The injury is that a good man in a good meeting told you what would happen, it did not, and there are only two explanations available to you and you have been quietly choosing the one that is about your own faith for a year.

So let me start with the word, because everything after it depends on this.

Blessed does not mean the house improves. It means the favor of God is resting on a person, His face is turned toward them. It is a fact about where He is looking. It is not a repair schedule and this site will not let it become one.

Now the verse, and I want to read it in the order Jesus said it, because it always gets quoted the other way round.

These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.John 16:33

Read the order. Peace in Me. Then, immediately: in the world ye shall have tribulation.

He says it flatly, as a statement of fact, to the people closest to Him, on the last night, hours before He is arrested. It is not a warning about what might happen. It is a description of what will.

And people quote the third clause on its own, and the third clause is glorious, but it does not cancel the second one. He did not say: in the world ye might have tribulation if you speak wrongly. He said ye shall.

You are living inside the exact sentence Jesus said would be true, and it was never conditional on how you spoke. John 16:33 puts the tribulation in the plain future indicative and the peace in Him rather than in the circumstances, and it is the Holy Spirit whom He had promised four chapters earlier as the one who would be with them through precisely that.

About the man at the meeting

Now let me deal with him, carefully, because he is not a villain and you already know that and you would resent me for making him one.

There is a true thing under what he said. Scripture does treat words as significant. Death and life are in the power of the tongue is in Proverbs and it is real. Speaking what God has said, out loud, over a situation is a good and biblical thing and this whole site is built on it.

What went wrong is the guarantee.

He said things would shift. Nobody can say that. He did not have that word and he could not have had it, and the moment a person attaches a promise about circumstances to an act of speaking, they have built a machine, and a machine that does not deliver always sends the bill to the person who operated it.

That is what has happened to you for a year. You have been paying an invoice for a machine that was never real.

You have not failed at anything, and there was never a mechanism to fail at. Scripture puts the authority in the Name and the outcome in His hands, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries a spoken word rather than a technique doing it, which is why nothing you did or stopped doing in month five is on that wall.

And here is what speaking actually is, since it is worth having properly. It is a person standing in agreement with what God has said, out loud, because saying a thing out loud puts a stake in the ground in your own hearing. It is not a lever. It changes the one speaking first, always, and what it does beyond that belongs to God.

You have been standing in agreement with God in a doorway for eighteen months, and that has been real every single time regardless of what the wall did. The written word gives the speaking and keeps the outcome in God's hands, and it is His Spirit who has been the one in that doorway with you rather than a principle you were operating.

What to do about the wall, plainly

Now the wall itself, because a message that leaves you spiritually comforted and still in a damp room has not helped you.

Keep the folder. Keep the reference numbers. Keep photographing it from the same angle, which was a good idea. Get the doctor's letter attached to the housing file if it is not already, and put it in writing every time, and ask for the complaint to be escalated in the words the system uses.

If there is an advice service or a tenants' union or a councilor near you, go this week. Take the folder. Somebody whose actual job it is will do in an afternoon what you have been doing alone for eighteen months.

That is not a failure of faith and it is not giving up on the speaking. It is what a person does, and there is no verse anywhere that puts the two in competition.

You have been doing this alone and you were never required to, and asking somebody whose job it is has nothing to do with whether you believe. Scripture is full of people using the ordinary means in front of them, and it is the Holy Spirit who gives wisdom to whoever asks, which includes wisdom about a housing complaint.

I am not going to tell you the wall gets sorted. I do not know. I hope it does and I am not going to convert a hope into a word.