life on planet earth on Renting

Though beauty gives you a weird sense of entitlement, it's rather frightening and threatening to have others ascribe such importance to something you know you're just renting for a while.

Kevin Blue has spent much of his ministry career serving the poor in inner-city Los Angeles. In this excerpt he describes working with a war vet named Clarence: Richard, Tim, Caroline and Ellen move...

The tension between autonomy and intimacy is most clearly evidenced in the trend toward cohabitation. Today, between 50 and 70 percent of American couples are cohabiting before or instead of marrying....

While most of us probably avoid borrowing money, there are cases in which people actually enjoy borrowing from other people. For instance, the Austrian poet Peter Altenberg loved to borrow money from ...

We fixed up the house and swapped it for another house and then another and then another. During the first ten years we were married, we moved six times. It was like being in the witness protection pr...

If you own something you cannot give away, then you don’t own it, it owns you.

For all our time and attention, no matter how carefully we curate our stuff or how much we might enjoy ourselves along the way, we’re all merely stocking and staging someone else’s opportunity for bar...

“I live in my sister’s basement!!!”

For many of us, living in excess doesn’t express itself in extremities. It doesn’t translate to tying $4,000 to balloons and releasing it into the air. It doesn’t have to amount to owning six houses (...

There was a man in New York City. Walked into a bank and asked for a loan. A loan officer came out and introduced himself. He said, how much you want? He goes, I want $5,000. I’m going to Europe on bu...

The essence of building is letting dwell.

Perhaps there is no object more desired than a house in America. Meghan Daum writes in her hilarious and poignant book Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in That House, “There is no object of desire qui...

Too often we give real estate to things in our lives that either haven’t earned their land or were never meant to occupy important space in the first place.

There is no object of desire quite like a house. Few things . . . are capable of eliciting such urgent, even painful, yearning.

I recently attended an event sponsored by Compassion International, the International Child Sponsorship Organization. The event was called “Stepping into My Shoes”. The purpose being to show children ...

The idea of a modest dwelling all our own, isolated from the problems of other people, has been our reigning metaphor of the good life for a long time. It must now be seen for what it really is: an an...

Sam and Pam, two friends, both arrived in the United States as immigrants from the country of Quadora. Each one wanted to buy a house, and it so happened they each found one for sale by a certain weal...

To inhabit a place is to dwell there in a practised way, in a way which relies upon certain regular, trusted, habits of behaviour. Our prevailing, individualistic frame of mind has led us to forget th...

Time is free, but it's priceless. You can't own it, but you can use it. You can't keep it, but you can spend it. Once you've lost it you can never get it back.

Suppose I sell you a piece of commercial property on which I am already behind in my mortgage payments. You not only pay me a fair price for the property but also pay my overdue payments. Now the prop...

I once offered up a free paint job during a church auction to raise money for a cause. I figured an elderly woman would bid a thousand dollars on a quick two- to three-day job and I could help someone...

Martin has just received his brand new driver’s license. The family trots out to the driveway and climbs in the car, where he is going to take them for a ride for the first time. Dad immediately heads...

When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.

An elderly master carpenter was ready to retire. He told his employer of his plans to leave the house building business and live a more leisurely life with his wife enjoying his extended family. He w...

One burden of homelessness is this: you’re always a stranger, counting on someone’s good graces.

Conversion in the U.S. seems to mean we’ve exchanged some of our shopping at Wal-Mart, Blockbuster, and Borders for the Christian Bookstore down the street. We’ve taken our lack of purchasing control ...

Anxiety is the interest paid on trouble before it is due.

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Many come to bring their clothes to church rather than themselves.

In his classic monologue, comedian George Carlin riffed on the mountain of stuff we compile. His assertion is that a “house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it.” So when you get right down to ...