It Will Be There Where I Can See It

You will paint a room, because paint can be painted over.

You will move furniture. You will replace a bulb. You will do anything at all that can be undone.

What you will not do is put a hole in a wall.

Because a hole is a decision that stays. If it is in the wrong place, it is in the wrong place tomorrow morning and next Christmas and in four years when somebody else buys the house. And you would walk past it every day, and every time you did, you would know exactly what afternoon it came from.

That is the real obstacle, and it is not about drilling. It is that you have decided a mistake with a permanent form is a permanent statement about you.

Let me put this down before anything else. Not knowing how is not a character flaw. And a crooked hole is a crooked hole. It is not a monument, it is not a confession, and it is not going to say anything about you to anybody except the one person who has decided in advance that it will.

As far as the east is from the west

There is a line in Psalm 103 about how God deals with a record, and the geometry of it is the point.

As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us. (Psalm 103:12, King James Version)

That measurement was chosen deliberately. North and south have ends. Go far enough north and you start going south. East and west never meet. There is no point at which they close.

So the psalm is describing a removal with no return path built into it. Not a record filed away somewhere. A record that has been taken out of the geometry entirely.

You have a God who removes a record along the one axis that never comes back around, and nothing that stays on a wall has ever once been able to follow a man the way a real record would. Psalm 103:12 chooses east and west precisely because they do not close, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets that read as freedom rather than as a nice sentiment.

And I want to be honest about the scale of it. That verse is about sin, which is a far heavier thing than a hole in drywall. But if God has dealt with the heavy version like that, the light version is not being kept in a ledger either.

You are living under a God who deals with the serious record that way, and a crooked hole has never once been the kind of thing He was keeping in the first place. The Spirit of God is the one who refuses to let a small thing be inflated into a large one, and it is written in Psalm 103 that the removal is measured along an axis with no end.

Everybody's house is full of them

Here is what would settle this in about ten minutes if it were possible to arrange.

Walk into eleven houses and look behind the pictures. Look at the back of the doors. Look at the wall behind the couch, and inside the closet, and above the door frame in the hallway.

Every house is full of holes in the wrong places. Every single one. Made by the previous owner, by a father in law, by somebody in nineteen ninety, by a person who was doing their best on a Sunday.

Nobody thinks anything about them. Nobody has ever walked into a house and constructed an opinion about a human being from a filled hole an inch to the left.

You have been treating as unique a thing that is in every wall in the country, and a mark in drywall has never once told a visitor anything at all about the person who made it. It is written in Psalm 103:12 that a genuine record is removed along an axis with no return, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can bring a small thing back down to its real size.

And here is the second half, which is genuinely practical. Almost nothing is actually permanent. A hole in drywall is filler and thirty seconds. A screw in the wrong place comes out. A bracket at the wrong height moves. Wood filler exists for exactly one reason, which is that people put things in the wrong place constantly.

The category of permanent is much smaller than it feels at eleven o'clock at night.

Now the limit, and I say it here rather than in a footer. Never a gas appliance, never the breaker panel, never mains wiring, never a wall holding the building up, never a roof. And in a wall you do not know, check what is behind it before anything goes in. Call a licensed professional when that is beyond you. That is not the fear talking, that is the one place the caution is exactly right.

You are entirely right to stop where a wall might be carrying something, and checking before you drill has never once been the same as never drilling. The Holy Spirit is the one who gives a person calm about a real boundary, and Scripture puts the removal of what actually matters along an axis that never closes.

Do one permanent thing and leave it

So here is the ask, and it is designed to break the specific belief rather than to hang a shelf.

Do one permanent thing tonight and leave it visible.

Put a hook in a wall. Fix a coat rack. Put up the small shelf. Something with a screw in it, in a place people walk past, and then leave it exactly as it comes out.

You are able to put one screw into one wall tonight, and one permanent thing has never once been able to become a statement about the man who did it. The Spirit of God is the one who meets a person at the moment a thing becomes irreversible, and Psalm 103:12 measures God's own removal along a line that has no coming back on it.

And here is the instruction that matters most. If it is slightly off, leave it. Do not fix it, do not fill it, do not move it a quarter inch.

Because the belief actually being tested tonight is not can I drill straight. It is: can I live in a house with visible evidence of my own learning in it. That belief only breaks by being contradicted, and it takes about four days.

On day four you will walk past it without seeing it. That is the whole experiment, and the result is always the same.

You have permission to leave a slightly wrong thing exactly where it is, and four days of walking past it has never once been the ordeal the first night promised. It is written in Psalm 103 that the removal is as far as the east is from the west, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the hallway with you.