How to Build a House In One Day
For Christians, shelter shouldn't cost a lifetime of toil
It ain’t pretty, but it has a story!
According to Welsh oral tradition, this is a “Tŷ unnos” or “one-night house.”
Back when God’s land was free/common, people could find an empty spot and just start building. If they had four walls and smoke coming out the chimney by sunrise, the house was theirs.
They could then claim all the land within the distance they could hurl an axe from each of the four corners of the house.
After that, they could put on a roof and finish the interior at their own pace:
Similar customs have been found in Ireland, Italy, France, and Turkey — all prior to the mass land enclosures of the 17th to 19th centuries. (Read: monopolization and theft by wealthy elites.)
Friends: Intentional koinonia communities could easily build one-day homes.
Christians have been doing so throughout history.
(Heck, the Amish regularly raise entire barns by suppertime!)
Even secular organizations like the woodland charity Coed Cymru built one for the Smithsonian.
My point is simple:
Shelter shouldn’t cost a lifetime of toil to banksters and land-lorders.
Why in the world should all of humanity pay land-lorders for monopolizing shelter in order to extract wealth from working contributors?
Why in the world should all of humanity pay banksters who didn’t build the house and didn’t even earn the money they loaned to the mortgagor?
Greed and exploitation are costing us all 30+ years of needless work and payments to parasites that could and should be spent on serving others and advancing the gospel.
I’m praying for God to miraculously provide land and the chance to build hundreds of one-day homes in my lifetime.
I'm also encouraging Christians to buy land in foundations and start coalescing koinonia communities. A tidal wave of deprivation is about to drown the West as trillion-dollar hedge funds devour the housing market. Christians need to be preparing to build hundreds of millions of homes. We need a new generation of desert fathers and mothers to start new cities of God. The bride of Christ needs to wake up!
But back to one-night houses.
The date carved on the fireplace of this particular house is 1475.
548 years of human shelter for one night’s work.
All we need to do is reject the hyper-individualism of our age, find like-minded Christians, and unite together against the forces of greed that enslave our world. We need to renew our minds. We need to be in this world, but not of it. We need to stop conforming to the idiotic pattern of this world.
A better way is possible.
Christians have done before, and we can do it again.
