This Saturday we moved our life and our stuff into our first house. The process is still overwhelming. There is still the sense of impermanence that goes with apartment living, the knowledge that you’ll only be there for so long and aren’t allowed to make many changes anyway.

I say this looking at freshly painted walls and recently sconced windows, which my parents helped me with over the last few days. They came in from Oklahoma City to catch the OU-Texas game and help us get settled. Their work ethic is amazing (even if it’s not replicable, by me anyhow).

Boxes and bags still litter the floor, but the shape of things to come now overpowers the clutter yet to be put away. A new feeling is creeping up on me: the sense that something needs to be done. Not so much the putting away of clothes and books–that’s nothing new. Mowing the lawn, cleaning the gutters, caulking the bathtub–these thoughts now haunt my mind. Countless homeowners have told me about this flavor of feeling–that there’s always something to be done–but until now it’s been someone else’s reality. Now I know, and I vacillate between dreading and anticipating the work for what’s now my house.

Part of me hopes I never move again. The trouble of moving is almost painful. But I cringe as I write “painful.” There is nothing painful about being lucky enough to own your own home. Billions don’t, so there should be no sense of entitlement about it. I’ve read enough liberation theology to know at least that much. The color of your skin and the place of your birth are much more predictive of your odds of owning a home than your just desserts. Owning your home makes you part of a global elite–whether you deserve it or not–and its naive to pretend otherwise.

So another part of me is ready to move again, and keep moving. There’s a homeless part of our soul, a nomadic urge to keep moving, keep moving. The call to identify with the poor can only stir this ancient urge, or rather what for the rich is an urge and the poor is a demand and necessity. “Mobility of labor” it’s called abstractly by Market™ theologians and promoted as one of the Market™’s primary graces. If it catches you on the backside, they say, you must not have been rightly quickened to the still small voice of the Market™.

So I sit here on the couch typing on my laptop (supplied to me by my job) feeling immensely proud of myself yet troubled by my (mostly unfelt) wealth and then troubled again for letting myself indulge in liberal guilt. But short of selling everything I own and giving it to the poor, I can see no other path before me. Besides, it’s time to clean the gutters.