Build houses, plant gardens
Living the long exile
The exiles in Babylon were desperate for one word above all: that this would be brief. False prophets were happy to give it to them: a few months and the captivity would break and they would go home. Through Jeremiah, God told them the opposite, and it must have landed like a blow. It would be seventy years. A lifetime. Most of those reading the letter would die in Babylon. And then, having shut the door on the quick rescue they wanted, God gave them an instruction almost scandalous in its ordinariness. Build houses and live in them. Plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry, have children, let your children marry. Settle in. Do not put your life on hold waiting for the disorientation to end; live faithfully inside it. And it is precisely here, in this letter telling them to unpack for the long haul, that the most beloved promise in the book appears. I know the thoughts that I think toward you, the LORD says, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you hope in your latter end. That famous word was not spoken to people about to be delivered. It was spoken to people told to plant gardens in the land of their captivity.
“Build houses, and dwell in them; and plant gardens, and eat the fruit of them.”
— The LORD, through Jeremiah — Jeremiah 29:5 (WEB)
“I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you hope in your latter end.”
This is Disorientation grown long, and it asks the hardest thing: that you live, fully, inside a season you did not choose and cannot yet end. The wilderness phase is not a waiting room to be endured with your real life on pause. It asks you to build and plant and bless the place, trusting God's good plans are at work within the exile, not only beyond it.
The hardest word in a long disorientation is that it may be long, and that you are not meant to spend it merely waiting for it to be over. Everything in you wants the timeline shortened, the season named temporary, your real life held in reserve until the wilderness ends and the actual living can begin. But this season is not a waiting room; it is the place your life is happening. Jeremiah's letter takes that hope away and hands you something sturdier. Marry. Live. Do not pause your life until Babylon releases you, because Babylon may not release you for a very long time, and the years are not a waiting room.
And here is the part you must not miss: God's good plans for you are not stored on the far side of this season. They are being worked out within it, in the houses you build and the gardens you plant in the middle of the exile. The promise of a hopeful future was given to people told to settle in. The future He intends is being grown, even now, in the soil you did not choose.
When the Church is consigned to a prolonged exile, it must resist two errors: pretending the loss is not happening, and merely white-knuckling until it ends. False voices in every age have promised the captivity would be brief, a quick return to the old standing. God's word is the harder one: settle in, build and plant, seek the good of the very place of exile, for the season will be long. The recurring upheavals of Christian history are not waiting rooms with the Body's real life on pause; they are where its witness actually unfolds. The promise of a hopeful future is real for the whole Church, and it is fulfilled within the exile, in the soil of the age it was given, not only after that age is over.
What cannot be shaken is the good purpose of God, at work inside the exile and not only beyond it. Seasons stretch long past what you can bear to wait. But the thoughts He thinks toward you, of peace and a future, do not falter with the years. When the wilderness will not end, His good plan for you remains.
- What part of my real life have I put on hold until this season is over?
- What would it mean to build and plant here, rather than only wait to leave?
- Can I believe God's good plans are at work within this exile, not just beyond it?
Lord, I have been living in a waiting room, my real life on pause until this season ends. Teach me to build and plant and live where You have set me. Let me trust Your good plans are growing here, in the soil of the place I did not choose. Amen.