I Do Not Know Which Room

You have been standing in the hall for about four minutes now.

I know that hall. My mother had one and I have one, and the thing about a hall is that every room in the house is visible from it and all of them are equally bad.

Kitchen. Back bedroom. The one with the door shut. The one that is not too bad but is getting there.

And you stand there, and you can feel yourself trying to choose, and what happens instead is a kind of quiet argument where each room presents its case. The kitchen matters most because of the food. The bedroom matters most because of the sleeping. The shut one matters most because of what it means. And every case is good, and the arguing takes all your energy, and then it is late and you go and sit down.

Nobody would call that laziness who had ever stood in that hall. But you call it that, because from the outside it is a woman standing in a hall doing nothing, and you have only ever seen yourself from the outside.

I have set before you life and death

There is a place in Deuteronomy where Moses puts a choice in front of a whole nation.

I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live. (Deuteronomy 30:19, King James Version)

Now I am not putting your kitchen in that verse. Your kitchen is not life and death and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

What I want from it is the shape. Look at how the choice is set up. Two things, and a plain instruction, and then it is over. There is no discussion of the merits. There is no weighing. Moses does not stand there for six months listing what could be said for either side.

And here is what strikes me every time. The people He is talking to have just come through forty years of not choosing anything. They were led. They were fed. They followed a cloud. And now they are being handed a choice and told to make it, and the making of it is the point, not the analysis behind it.

You are not stuck because you are indecisive, and Deuteronomy 30:19 has never once required a person to justify a choice before making it. It is written as an instruction and not as a debate, which means the deciding is the obedience rather than the reasoning, and the Holy Spirit is the one who steadies a hand that has been hovering a long time.

You have been weighing rooms against each other as if one of them was the right answer. The word sets the choice down plainly and tells the hearer to choose, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes the fear of the wrong pick out of a person who has been paralyzed by it.

There is no correct room

I want to say the useful thing now, and it is going to sound too plain, and I mean it exactly as it sounds.

There is no correct room.

And before we go on, one thing needs saying plainly: a house is a record of what a season cost, and it is not a verdict on the person standing in the hall. Not one of those rooms is more right than another. The kitchen is not a better start than the bedroom. The bedroom is not more virtuous than the hall. Any of them, cleared by one tray sized surface, gets the identical result, which is that a person did something in a house tonight.

The reason it does not feel that way is that the choosing has been carrying a second job. Underneath choosing a room, you have been trying to choose the room that would prove you had chosen well. That is what makes it heavy. That is why the argument in the hall never settles, because there is no room that answers that second question, and there never was one.

You were never failing to decide, and what you were doing was looking for an answer to a question that has no answer in it. Deuteronomy 30:19 hands a choice over and never once grades the reasoning of the one who makes it, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates a decision from a performance.

So we take the second job away. Tonight the room does not have to be right. It only has to be picked, and no room in this house has ever once been a verdict on the woman who lives in it.

You are permitted to choose badly tonight, and a badly chosen room has never once been worse than an unchosen one. It is written that the instruction is simply to choose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a decision made carelessly by somebody who has spent months being careful.

Any room, and the nearest surface in it

So here is what I am asking.

Pick a room. Do not think about it. The one in front of your face. The nearest door. If two of them are equal, take the one on the left.

In that room, find the surface nearest the door, tray sized, and clear it. Take what is on it off it. Put it anywhere in that room. Do not sort a thing.

Then stop.

You have enough to work with tonight, and it has never once included knowing which room mattered most. Deuteronomy 30:19 puts the whole weight on the choosing, and the Spirit of God is present in an arbitrary room chosen at random by a tired person in a hall.