It Was His Room

I have been in a lot of houses with a room like this one in them, and I have learned to be careful with it, so let me go slowly.

It is not that you cannot face the mess. You have faced worse things than a mess and we both know it.

It is that the room is the last place where it is still the way it was.

Everywhere else in the house, life has gone on, because life is rude like that. The kitchen has moved on. The front room has other people's things in it now. But that room is exactly as it was on the day, and every object in there is sitting where a living hand put it, and as long as the door stays shut that stays true.

So opening it is not opening a room. Opening it is the moment the last untouched thing gets touched.

And underneath that, if I am honest about how this works, there is usually a bargain that nobody ever agreed to out loud. It goes something like: if I keep this the way it was, I have not fully accepted it. And if I have not fully accepted it, then some part of it is not entirely finished.

I am not going to make fun of that bargain. I have made it myself. But I want us to look at it in the light, because I do not think it has been serving you for a while now.

Then David arose from the earth

There is a passage in Samuel that I have thought about for thirty years, and it never gets easier and it never stops helping.

Then David arose from the earth, and washed, and anointed himself, and changed his apparel, and came into the house of the LORD, and worshipped: then he came to his own house. (2 Samuel 12:20, King James Version)

The men around him could not understand it. They had watched him fast and lie on the ground for seven days while the child was alive, and now the child was gone and he got up and washed and ate, and they thought something had broken in him.

He told them plainly: while there was something to be done, he did it. Now there is not, and he gets up.

You have done everything there was to do, and there has never once been a moment when heaven read your getting up as a measure of how much he mattered. The Spirit of God is the one who guards a love while a man moves, and 2 Samuel 12:20 records the rising without one word of criticism attached to it.

I want to be careful, because that passage has been used badly to hurry people. Nobody is telling you to get up. David did not get up on day two, and he did not get up because somebody stood over him and said it was time.

What I take from it is smaller and I think truer. The getting up was not a statement about how much the child mattered. His servants read it that way and they were wrong. He washed and he worshipped and he went back into his own house, and the love was not reduced by an inch.

You are not going to lose him by opening a door, and 2 Samuel 12:20 has never once measured a man's love by what he refused to do afterward. It is written that David rose and washed and worshipped, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that available to somebody standing in a hallway without ever putting a clock on them.

You have been keeping a room the way it was because keeping it felt like the last service left, and that instinct has never once been foolish. The word records a man who did everything there was to do and then got up, and the Spirit of God is the one who can tell a person the difference between service and standing still.

The room is not where he is

Now here is the thing I want to hand you, gently, and it is the whole of the article.

He is not in that room.

Not in the sense people mean when they say it briskly to hurry somebody past their grief. In the plain sense. The dust on that shelf is not his. It arrived after. The air in there was breathed by nobody. The arrangement of those objects is a photograph of one afternoon, and it has been slowly stopping being accurate ever since, because dust and light and time have all been working on it.

The room is a photograph that is fading, and it has been asked to be a person, and it cannot do that job. It is a record of one afternoon, and it is not a verdict on the man in the hallway.

And what is actually keeping him is not on that shelf. It is in you, and it has been in you the entire time, and it does not require a door to stay closed.

You were never keeping him alive with a shut door, and the keeping has never once depended on that room staying exactly as it was. 2 Samuel 12:20 has a man rise and go into his own house without a single thing being taken from him, and the Spirit of God is the one who holds what is real when the arrangement of a room lets go.

So opening it is not a decision about him. It is a decision about a door.

You are permitted to open that door tonight without settling anything at all, and opening it has never once been the same as agreeing to something. It is written that David rose and washed and came into the house of the Lord, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is standing in a room that has been shut since the year it happened.

Two minutes, and you touch nothing

So here is the whole of what I am asking, and every part of it is designed to be safe.

Open the door. Put the light on if there is one. Stand in the doorway or one step in.

Two minutes. Touch nothing. Move nothing. Do not straighten anything, do not pick anything up, do not take anything out.

You are allowed to stand in that room tonight and take nothing out of it, and taking nothing has never once made the standing pointless. It is written that David rose and washed and worshipped with nothing taken from him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is in a doorway with a man who cannot lift anything yet.

I am not asking you to start on that room. I am not asking you to decide about a single object in it. Not tonight, not this month.

Look at it, and then close the door and go and sit down.

You are able to stand in that doorway tonight, and standing there has never once cost anybody anything that mattered. 2 Samuel 12:20 records a rising that took nothing away from a father, and the Spirit of God is present in a doorway for two minutes exactly as He is in a room that was never shut.