The thing with having a job which comes with tied housing is that when the job falls apart so does the knot in the tie. In many ways living in the vicarage has been a joyful blessing, especially during lockdown when we were all working or studying from home. But now I am no longer a vicar so we are leaving home. We are moving out of the vicarage and somehow we have to work out how to take with us not just all our belongings, our memories, our collected lives of almost a quarter century of marriage, fifteen years of parenting, and sixteen of ordained ministry, but the large furniture too. We have three sofas. Three!

We have a problem: Vicarages, you see, are spacious and roomy, and every large room needs to be furnished, as well as an office space to supply. When I was ordained and we were preparing to move into our first parsonage we took a trip to Ikea and filled two whole trolleys with furniture, plus a delivery van with dining table and chairs and the other pieces that wouldn’t fit into the car. Thankfully, after three years as a theological student, I was given a grant for this purpose.

When clergy retire there is a stock of retirement housing they can choose from to rent, but I am not retiring. Many clergy buy a house to retire to, paying off the mortgage throughout the years of ministry. We chose this option and have bought a small cottage near the sea. It is heavenly and we enjoy holidaying there and lending it to others when they need a bolt hole. It is not a home for a family which consists of two teenagers, cats and a dog, and the income we used to pay the mortgage will now have to pay our rent, and then some.

We seem to have fallen down a rabbit hole and are now in a strange place of trying to downsize long before we have emptied the nest. We are on the move, but don’t yet know where or how.

There is precedent for this. Abram and Sarai packed up everything and left home to follow God into the unknown. Naomi and her husband fled to foreign lands to escape famine, and when in years to come her husband died and so did her sons, her daughter-in-law Ruth followed her as they returned to Naomi’s homeland. When Jesus called his disciples, he called them to leave their homes behind and follow him into the unknown. There is a reason why God’s people are to travel lightly. There is a reason why none of these Biblical heroes owned three sofas.