The Deed in the Dresser Drawer

When Marco Alvarez moved into the small bungalow on Sycamore Street in Tucson, he treated it like every other rental. He let the faucet drip for weeks. He nailed shelves into the plaster without anchors. He figured it was someone else's problem — he was just passing through.

Then one afternoon, sorting through papers his late grandmother had left him, Marco found a property deed folded inside a yellowed envelope. The bungalow was his. His grandmother had purchased it outright years ago and placed it in his name. Every month he had been mailing rent checks to a management company that simply deposited them into his own account. He had owned the place all along.

Marco said something shifted in him that very evening. He fixed the faucet. He patched the walls. He planted rosemary along the front walk. Not because the house had changed, but because he finally understood whose it was.

Paul tells the Corinthians something even more staggering. You are not your own, he writes. You were bought at a price. The God of all creation paid what no one else could pay, and now His Spirit has taken up residence in the very body you walk around in every day. Your body is not a rental. It is a dwelling place of the Holy One. When that truth finally settles into your bones, it changes how you treat every room in the house.