It Is Not Things Behind That Door

Let me say the thing out loud that you already know and have never had said back to you.

That room is not full of mess. That room is full of decisions.

Every single item in there is an unanswered question. Do I keep this. Does this still fit the life I have now. Who do I give this to. Is it disloyal to let this go. What does it mean about me if I throw this away.

And that is why it does not respond to cleaning. Cleaning is a thing you do with your hands. That room needs something done with your will, and you have been standing in the doorway of it with a bin bag, which is like taking a wrench to a conversation.

You have been calling yourself lazy about a room that has never asked you for energy. It has been asking you for judgment, over and over, in about four hundred small pieces, on days when you did not have four hundred of anything. A room like that is a record of what a season cost, and it is not a verdict on the person who lives beside it.

Choose you this day

There is a moment at the end of Joshua where a whole nation is stood in front of a decision.

And if it seem evil unto you to serve the LORD, choose you this day whom ye will serve; whether the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell: but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD. (Joshua 24:15, King James Version)

Now what I want from that verse is not the subject matter, because your grandmother's dishes are not idols and I am not going to insult either of you by pretending otherwise.

What I want is the structure, and there are two things in it.

You are being handed one day and one choice tonight, and it has never once been four hundred of them at the same time. Joshua 24:15 says choose you this day, singular and dated, and the Holy Spirit is the one who cuts a heap of open questions down to the one that can be looked at.

The first is that he calls it a day. Choose you this day. He does not ask for a policy or a philosophy. He asks for one decision, made on one day, by people standing in one place.

The second is that he goes first. But as for me and my house. He does not stand back and watch them decide. He states his own and then leaves them room.

That is what has been missing from that room. Nobody has ever gone first, and there has never been a day, only a permanent low hum of four hundred open questions with no deadline on any of them.

You are not indecisive, and Joshua 24:15 has never once asked a person to make four hundred decisions in one evening. It is written as a choice made on a day rather than as a temperament, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a person one decision at a time instead of a heap of them.

You have been carrying an open question about every object in that room, and no one alive could carry that and stay standing. The word puts the choosing on a single day with a man who goes first, and the Spirit of God is the one who goes first in a room where nobody ever has.

Naming a decision is not making it

Here is the piece that changes what tonight can be.

There is a step before deciding, and almost nobody knows it exists. The step is naming. Saying, out loud, this object is waiting on a decision.

That sounds like nothing. It is not nothing. At the moment, that room is one undifferentiated weight. Everything in it is equally heavy because none of it has been sorted into what needs a decision and what is simply in the wrong place.

The moment one thing gets named as a decision, two things happen. It stops being mess, which it never was, and it becomes a specific question with a specific answer somewhere, which mess never has.

You are permitted to name one thing tonight without answering it, and naming has never once obligated you to decide. Joshua 24:15 puts a choice in front of people plainly before a single one of them opens their mouth, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates a question from a burden.

And I want to say the pastoral thing here, because this is where people get hurt. Some of those decisions are not about objects at all. Some of them are about a person, or a version of your life, or something you have not agreed to yet. Those ones do not get decided by being brisk about them.

You were never failing at a cleaning job, and it has never once been a cleaning job. It is written that the choosing was set before a whole people as a real weight and not a chore, and the Holy Spirit is the one who honors that weight instead of hurrying somebody past it.

Two minutes, and one thing named

So here is the whole of what I am asking, and it ends before the hard part starts.

Open the door. Put the light on. Stand there for two minutes and let your eyes go round.

Then pick one thing. Any one. Say out loud, that is a decision I have not made.

Do not make it. Do not touch it. Do not move it.

Then close the door and stop.

You are able to name one thing tonight, and naming it has never once put you under obligation to resolve it. Joshua 24:15 calls for a choosing on a day rather than a clearing of a room, and the Spirit of God is present in a sentence said out loud in a doorway.