I Stopped Asking People In

You did not decide this.

That is the first thing, and it matters more than it sounds. There was no evening when you sat down and concluded that people would not be coming to this house any more. It happened the way a path closes over: nothing dramatic, just nobody walking it.

What actually happened was smaller. Somebody said they might drop by, and you looked at the room, and you heard yourself say that this week was a bit much. And that was true. It was a bit much.

Then it happened again about a month later, and the reason that time was genuinely different, and it was also true.

And now it has been the better part of a year, and there is a whole stack of true reasons, and underneath all of them sits one room with the work stopped in the middle of it.

Here is what I want to say before anything else. The room is not the problem you think it is. The room is small. What the room bought was a year of nobody sitting in your front room, and that is not small at all.

You are a woman who was given to hospitality long before that room was started, and one unfinished corner has never once canceled that.

Given to hospitality

Paul writes a run of short instructions to the church at Rome, and they come fast, one clause each, no explanation attached to any of them.

Distributing to the necessity of saints; given to hospitality. (Romans 12:13, King James Version)

Given to hospitality.

It is a strange phrase in English and it repays a second look. Not practicing hospitality. Not performing it. Given to it, the way a person is given to laughing, or given to worrying. It describes a disposition rather than an activity.

Which means it is a thing about you, not a thing about your house. A woman given to hospitality in a finished house and the same woman in a torn up house are the same woman. The disposition did not go anywhere. It just stopped having anywhere to put itself.

You are given to hospitality in the present tense, and a room with the work stopped in it has no standing to say otherwise. Romans 12:13 puts the phrase in the middle of a list of dispositions and never once attaches a condition about the house, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps that true in a year when nobody came.

And look at what sits immediately before it. Distributing to the necessity of saints. Meeting a real need with real things. Then, in the same breath, hospitality, as though the two are the same motion.

That is not decoration. That is the letter treating the open door as a form of provision, which means what has been closed for a year was not a social nicety.

You have been holding something back that scripture treats as provision, and you were never withholding it on purpose. The Holy Spirit is the one who can tell the difference between a woman hiding and a woman who ran out of room, and Romans 12:13 names the thing itself without ever naming a standard for the house it happens in.

The reasons were all true and that is the difficulty

If the reasons had been excuses this would be easier to see.

But every single one of them was accurate. The week really was too full. You really were tired. It really would have meant moving boxes off the sofa first.

That is what makes this particular closure so hard to notice from the inside. There was never a lie to catch. Each individual no was defensible, and the sum of all the defensible noes is a year.

You were not lying to anybody, and a year built entirely out of true sentences is still a year that can be opened again tonight. Romans 12:13 speaks to a disposition rather than to a calendar, and the Spirit of God is the one who does not require you to go back and account for the noes before you say one yes.

And there is a second thing under the reasons, and it is quieter.

You do not want anybody standing in that room and doing the thing people do, which is to look, and then to look away, and then to say something kind. That is the actual fear. It is not the mess. It is the kindness.

You have named the real thing, and being looked at kindly is a thing a person is allowed to find hard. The Spirit of God is the one who is with a woman when she admits that, and Romans 12:13 never asks her to be finished before she is willing.

Look at the room itself, not at the year

So here is the practical claim and it is the whole article.

Nobody has actually looked at that room in months, including the woman who lives there. Avoiding a thing is a different act from seeing it, and avoiding it keeps it exactly the size it was on the day the work stopped.

You are looking at two different rooms, the one in the house and the one in your head, and only one of them has ever had a specific amount of work left in it. Romans 12:13 is written to a woman and not to a property, and the Spirit of God is the one who brings a symbol back down to the size of an object.

Two minutes in the doorway will tell you which.

You are able to stand in a doorway and look at a room, and looking has never once obliged you to start working on it. Romans 12:13 is about a disposition and not about a deadline, and the Holy Spirit is the one who stands in the doorway with you for the whole two minutes.

Not to plan. Not to assess what it needs and what it would take and which weekend. If you catch yourself planning, come back to looking.

Just stand there and let it be a room again instead of a reason.