Build houses, plant gardens

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.

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. Jeremiah's letter takes that hope away and hands you something sturdier. Build. Plant. 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. They are the place your life is happening. And here is the part you must not miss: God's good plans for you are not reserved for 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. So settle in. The future He intends is being grown, even now, in the soil you did not choose.