There Is A Room I Do Not Open

You walk past it several times a day and you have stopped noticing that you turn your head.

Not dramatically. You do not stand outside it and think about it. You go past, and something in you adjusts a little, and you carry on to the kitchen. It has been like that for long enough that the turning of the head is just how the hallway works now.

And if somebody asked you what is in there you could tell them roughly. Boxes. The things that went in when the rest of the house needed to look all right. Whatever was easiest to move out of sight that year.

But that is not really what is in there, is it.

What is in there, the way you have come to hold it, is a fact about you. Somewhere along the way that door stopped being a door and became a verdict. It became the proof of the thing you suspect about yourself, sitting at the end of your own hallway, and that is why you turn your head, and that is why two years have gone by.

I want to say something plainly before we go any further, and I want to say it without any softening. That room is a room. It is a rectangular space with things in it. It is not a secret about who you are. It has never been a verdict and it has never been proof.

The darkness and the light are both alike to thee

There is a line in the middle of a psalm about being known, and it is doing something specific.

Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee. (Psalm 139:12, King James Version)

The darkness hides nothing from Him. The night shines as the day.

Now hold that against your hallway for a second, because it lands somewhere very particular. The room you have kept shut is not a place God has not been able to see into. There is no room in your house that is dark to Him. He has been in there the entire time, and He was in there before you shut the door, and nothing behind that door was news.

And notice the last clause, because that is the whole medicine. Both alike to thee. Not: He sees into the dark and is grieved. Not: He sees into the dark and is waiting for you to fix it. Alike. The dark room and the lit room are the same kind of place to Him, and He has no different feeling walking into one than the other.

You are fully seen already, and there has never once been a room in your house that He needed you to open before He could look. Psalm 139:12 says the darkness hides nothing and calls dark and light alike to Him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a relief instead of an exposure.

You have been guarding a room from somebody who is already in it

Here is the part I want you to see, and it took me a while to see it about a room of my own.

The closed door is not keeping anybody out. Everybody who matters knows the house has been hard. The door is not protecting you from God, who is already in there and unbothered. And it is not protecting you from yourself, because you carry the room with you all day anyway. You think about it in the car.

So the door is doing no work at all. It has all the cost of a secret and none of the function of one.

And I think something happened before that door started staying shut. It usually does. There was a stretch where you had nothing spare, and the things that could not be dealt with went in there, and the door closed, and then the closing outlived the stretch. That is not a character defect. That is a person who ran out of room and used the room they had.

You are carrying that room all day already, and the closed door has never once been the thing keeping you from being known. The written word says the night shines as the day to Him, and the Spirit of God is the one who ends the guarding of a place He has been sitting in the whole time.

Two minutes, and you clean nothing

So here is the whole task, and I want to be exact about the size of it, because the size is where this goes wrong.

Open the door. Stand in it for two minutes. Close it again.

You do not touch anything. You do not carry anything out. You do not make a plan, you do not count, you do not decide about a single item in there. You are not going in to start. You are going in to look, and looking is the entire assignment.

I mean it about the two minutes. Set something if you need to. And then close the door and go and do something ordinary.

Psalm 139:12 puts God in that room already with no reaction at all, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person look at something they have been avoiding without it costing them the evening.

You are able to look at that room tonight, and looking has never once obliged you to fix it. Psalm 139:12 calls the darkness and the light both alike to Him, and the Spirit of God is the one who steadies a person in a doorway for two minutes.