Open It And Do Nothing

Here is why you have not opened that door, and I do not think it is what people assume.

It is not that you cannot bear to look. You could look. Looking is about four seconds and you have survived much worse than four seconds.

It is that in your head, opening the door starts something.

Because that is what opening a door means, in every version of this conversation you have ever had with yourself and with anybody else. You open it, and then you are in it, and then you are three hours in with everything on the floor and it is worse than when you started and it is eleven at night.

So the door is not a door. The door is the first move of a job you know you do not have in you tonight, and refusing to open it is not cowardice at all. It is a reasonable person declining to start something they cannot finish.

I want to take the job off the door.

Yea, though I walk through the valley

There is a line everybody knows, and there is a word in it that almost nobody notices.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. (Psalm 23:4, King James Version)

Through.

Not into. Not down into and set up camp. Through the valley.

The whole grammar of that verse is a person passing along a path. There is no work described anywhere in it. He is not clearing the valley. He is not fixing the valley. He is not being asked to make the valley into something else before he is allowed to be comforted.

You are permitted to pass through a place without improving it, and no valley in Scripture has ever once had to be cleared before the comfort arrived. The Holy Spirit is the one who accompanies rather than assigns, and Psalm 23:4 keeps the rod and the staff beside a man in a place that has not changed at all.

He walks through, and the comfort is available in the middle of the walking, in a place that has not been improved at all.

That is the shape I want for you tonight. Not entering a room to do something about it. Passing through, and being accompanied while you do.

You are not required to change a room to be allowed inside it, and Psalm 23:4 has never once made improvement the price of company. It is written that the walking is through and not into, which puts the whole verse in motion and not in labor, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that available to somebody in their own hallway.

You have been treating a doorway as the start of a job, and never once has that door had the authority to sign you up for anything. The word describes a man passing through a bad place with a rod and a staff beside him, and the Spirit of God is the one who walks with a person in a room they are not going to work on.

The job on the door is why the door stays shut

Now the practical piece, and it is worth saying carefully because it is the whole hinge.

Every task attached to that door makes the door heavier. Right now the door has a whole afternoon attached to it. Bags. Sorting. Decisions. Someone to help. A dumpster on the driveway.

Nobody can open a door with an afternoon on it. Nobody at all. And so the door does not open, and the not opening feels like a failure of nerve, when what is actually happening is a person being asked to lift something nobody could lift. That room is a record of what a hard stretch cost, and it is not a verdict on the woman standing outside it.

Take the afternoon off it and it is a door again. It weighs what a door weighs.

You were never failing to open a door, and what you were declining was a whole afternoon disguised as a handle. Psalm 23:4 puts a man in motion through a bad place with no task assigned to him at all, and the Spirit of God is the one who unhooks a job from an object it was never attached to.

And here is what makes tonight safe. I am not asking for a small piece of the job. I am asking for none of it. That distinction matters, because a small piece is still the job, and the job is what you have been refusing for good reasons.

You are permitted to open that door and do absolutely nothing behind it, and doing nothing has never once made the opening pointless. It is written that he walks through and the comfort is present in the valley itself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is in a room that is not going to be touched tonight.

Two minutes, and no work of any kind

So here is the whole of it, and I want to be almost pedantic.

Open the door. Put the light on. Stand there or step in.

Two minutes. No sorting. No picking up. No moving one thing six inches. No mental planning, either, and that one is the hard one. If you catch yourself deciding what would go first, stop and look instead.

Then close the door and go and sit down.

You are able to be in that room tonight with nothing asked of you, and being there has never once obligated you to a single hour afterward. Psalm 23:4 has a man walking through a valley with no work in the verse anywhere, and the Spirit of God is present in two minutes of doing nothing exactly as He is in a day of clearing.