I want to test something with you, and it will take about ten seconds.
Imagine somebody came in tomorrow while you were out and emptied that room completely. Carpet swept, walls bare, nothing in it. You come home and open the door and it is a clean empty room.
Now notice what happens in your chest when you picture standing in there.
For a lot of people, and I think for you, the feeling does not go away in that picture. It is not much smaller. And that tells us something important, because it means the feeling was never being produced by the objects.
The mess is not what you are avoiding. It never was. What is in that room is a feeling, and the objects are just the reason you have been able to give yourself for staying out.
That is not a criticism. It is a relief, and I will tell you why. Because you have been trying to solve a feeling with a bin bag for two years, and it has not worked, and you have concluded from that failure that you are hopeless.
You are not hopeless. You have been using the wrong tool, and you did not know there was another one. That room is a record of what a hard stretch cost, and it is not a verdict on the person who lives here.
The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart
There is a verse in the Psalms that I have carried into more rooms than I can count.
The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit. (Psalm 34:18, King James Version)
Nigh. Near.
Notice what the verse does not do. It does not say He is near to those who have recovered. It does not say He arrives when the person has pulled themselves together, or cleaned up, or got their house in order.
Nigh unto them that are of a broken heart. Present tense, during, in the middle of it, while it is still broken.
And notice where that places Him in relation to your house. If He is near the broken heart, and the broken part of you is what has been living in that room, then He has not been waiting outside the door with you.
He has been in there.
You are not walking into an empty room tonight, and Psalm 34:18 has never once put God at a distance from the part of a person that hurts. It is written that He is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, present tense and without conditions, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes near mean near for somebody standing in a hallway.
You have been guarding a room from the one who has already been sitting in it. The word puts Him closest to exactly what you have been keeping behind a door, and the Spirit of God is the one who was in there through every month it stayed shut.
The feeling is not going to be dealt with tonight
Now I want to be honest about what I am not doing, because false promises are how people get hurt.
I am not going to clear that feeling tonight. I cannot and I would not pretend to. Whatever is in that room, the year it belongs to, the person it belongs to, the version of your life it belongs to, that is not resolved by a two minute exercise and I will not insult it.
What I want to do is much smaller and I think much more useful. I want the door to stop being the place where the feeling lives.
You have been meeting a feeling in a hallway eleven times a day, and no door has ever once been the right place for it to live. The Spirit of God is the one who separates what hurts from the wood it got attached to, and Psalm 34:18 puts the Lord nearest the broken part rather than outside the room it is in.
Right now the feeling and the door are welded together. You cannot go near one without the other, and because the door is in your hallway, the feeling is in your hallway, and you meet it eleven times a day on your way to the bathroom.
If you open that door and stand there and nothing catastrophic happens, the weld starts to come apart. Not the feeling. The weld.
You were never avoiding a room, and what you have been avoiding is a feeling that got attached to a door. Psalm 34:18 puts God nearest the broken place rather than furthest from it, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates a feeling from a piece of wood with a handle on it.
You are permitted to feel the whole of it tonight and still be standing at the end. It is written that He saveth such as be of a contrite spirit, which is a promise about the middle and not about the recovery, and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds somebody upright inside two minutes they have been dreading for a long time.
Two minutes, and you are allowed to cry
So here is the whole of what I am asking, and I want to say the difficult part plainly.
Open the door. Put the light on. Stand there for two minutes.
You are permitted to feel the whole weight of it in that doorway tonight, and feeling it has never once meant the exercise went wrong. It is written that He saveth such as be of a contrite spirit, which is a promise about the middle, and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds somebody upright inside two minutes they have dreaded for years.
Touch nothing. Move nothing. Begin nothing.
And if it hits you, let it. You may cry standing in that doorway. That is not the exercise going wrong. That is the exercise, and it is the only part of it that was ever going to be hard.
Then close the door and go and sit down.
You are able to stand in that doorway tonight, and standing there has never once required the feeling to be finished first. Psalm 34:18 has Him near during the broken part, and the Spirit of God is present in a doorway with somebody crying exactly as He is in a room where nothing hurts.
So here is what I believe is going out tonight over somebody who has been calling a feeling a mess.
You are not weak, and two years of staying out of one room has never once been a fact about your courage. I am not promising you the feeling goes and I am not promising you that room gets dealt with. Psalm 34:18 puts God near a broken heart during the breaking, and it is the Holy Spirit, not my saying so, who takes that and stands it between you and the voice that has been telling you that you should be over this.
And this, which is the word I came with:
You have never once opened that door onto an empty room, and there has never been a single month when He was not already in there. The written word says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that true in a hallway at nine in the evening with your hand on a handle.
Open it. Two minutes. You are allowed to cry. Then close it.
Declare this over yourself
- Feeling that waits in that room, I am opening the door tonight, and going in is not the same as being taken apart. Psalm 34:18 says the Lord is nigh unto them of a broken heart, so by the Holy Spirit I stand in that doorway two minutes in the name of Jesus.
- Door that has been carrying the whole weight, you were never the thing I was afraid of. The written word puts Him nearest the broken place and not outside it, and by the Holy Spirit I am finished treating a piece of wood as though the feeling lived in it.
- Lord, You are the one who is nigh during the breaking and not after it. Your word says You save such as be of a contrite spirit, so by Your Spirit I open that door tonight, and I stand there, and I close it, and I stop.
Psalm 34:18
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