The Spare Room Ate The House

Let me tell you how this happened, because I do not think anybody has ever laid it out for you and I think the laying out helps.

It started with one room. Probably the spare room. Probably during something.

Things went in there because there was nowhere else and no time. Fine. That is what a spare room is for, and every family in the world has done it.

Then one day the spare room was full, and something else needed to go somewhere, and there was no more spare room, so it went in the corner of the dining room. And that was meant to be temporary.

Then the dining room table got a pile on one end, and eating moved to the kitchen. Then the kitchen counter took a stack, and the cooking moved to two rings and a corner. Then the front room got a chair that stopped being a chair.

And now you live in about forty percent of your own house, and every one of those steps was reasonable, and there was never a single moment where a person made a decision that a reasonable person would question.

That is why you cannot find the place where you went wrong. There is not one. There is a chain of sensible temporary answers, and nobody ever came back for any of them. This house is a record of what those years cost, and it is not a verdict on the family living in it.

The wall thereof was broken down

There is a passage in Proverbs where a man walks past a neglected field and looks over the wall, and it is not written to mock anybody.

I went by the field of the slothful, and by the vineyard of the man void of understanding; And, lo, it was all grown over with thorns, and nettles had covered the face thereof, and the stone wall thereof was broken down. (Proverbs 24:30 and 31, King James Version)

Now I have to be careful here, because that passage uses a hard word and the hard word is not aimed at you and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

Here is what I actually want from it. Look at what the observer notices last and what actually matters most. The thorns are the visible thing. The nettles are the visible thing. But the sentence ends on the wall, and the wall is the cause.

You are looking at thorns and calling them the disease, and the thorns have never once been the cause of anything. The Spirit of God is the one who shows a person a mechanism instead of a fault, and Proverbs 24:31 ends its whole account on a broken wall rather than on the man who owned the field.

A field does not fill with thorns because the owner is bad. A field fills with thorns because there is no longer any line between the field and everything outside it. The wall going down is what let the rest happen, and the thorns are the consequence, not the disease.

Your spare room stopped having a wall. And once it had no wall, the dining room had no wall, and then the kitchen. What has happened in this house is not an accumulation of failures. It is a boundary that came down years ago and has been quietly moving outward ever since.

You are not looking at a field of thorns because of what kind of person you are, and Proverbs 24:31 has never once made the thorns the cause of anything. It is written that the stone wall was broken down, which names a boundary as the real subject, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a person the cause without turning the showing into an accusation.

You have been living inside a line that has been moving for years, and never once has there been a night where a reasonable person would have stopped it. The word looks past the nettles to the wall, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a person see a mechanism instead of a character.

The first room is where the wall goes back

Now here is why I am sending you to that first room tonight and not to the kitchen, which is worse.

Everything downstream of that room is a symptom. Clear the dining table and it refills, because the pressure that put things on it is still coming out of the same door. Clear the counter and it refills. Both of those have been done in this house before, more than once, and the refilling was never a comment on the person who did the clearing.

The room where it started is where the wall goes back. Not tonight. I am not asking you to do anything to it tonight. But that is where the work eventually is, and knowing that changes what all the other rooms mean.

They are not eleven failures. They are one boundary, expressed in eleven places.

You were never losing eleven separate battles, and what has been happening is one thing wearing eleven different faces. Proverbs 24:31 ends its account on a wall rather than on a man, and the Spirit of God is the one who gathers eleven accusations back into one manageable fact.

So tonight is a survey. That is all. A person goes and looks at where the wall was.

You are permitted to look at the beginning of this without a single word of blame attached to the looking. It is written that the man went by and considered it well before he said anything at all, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is standing in a spare room that nobody has walked into on purpose in years.

Two minutes in the room it started in

So here is the whole of what I am asking.

Go to the room where it began. The spare room. The box room. Whichever one filled first.

Open the door and put the light on. Stand there for two minutes.

Touch nothing. Move nothing. Do not begin. Look at it, and let it be the room where this started rather than the room that proves something about you.

Then close the door and stop.

You are able to go and look at where it began, and looking has never once obligated you to fix it tonight. Proverbs 24:31 has a man consider a field carefully before anything is said about it, and the Spirit of God is present in two minutes of honest looking exactly as He is in a day of work.