I Use That Room Every Day

Try it now, before you go anywhere near it.

Describe that room. Out loud, from where you are sitting, without getting up. What is finished. What is not. Which wall. How far it got.

Most people cannot do it. They know the fact of it, which is that the room is not finished, and they cannot produce a single detail, which is a strange thing to be true about somewhere you stand every single day.

And you do stand in it every day. That is what makes this room different from the garage and the spare room and all the places a person can simply avoid. This one gets used. You are in there in the morning and you are in there at night and it never once comes into focus.

That is not carelessness. That is a skill, and you built it, and it works, and it has been working for about a year.

The trouble with a skill like that is that it cannot be aimed. You cannot train yourself not to see one wall. You can only train yourself not to look, and once that is running, a great many other things in that room stop being seen as well.

You are able to see a room you have been living inside, and a year of trained blindness has never once been a fault in the woman doing it.

Turn away mine eyes

There is a line in the long psalm about the law where the writer asks for something surprising to be done to his eyes.

Turn away mine eyes from beholding vanity; and quicken thou me in thy way. (Psalm 119:37, King James Version)

Turn away mine eyes.

It is a request, and it is addressed outward. He does not say I will stop looking. He asks for his eyes to be turned, which means he is treating his own sight as something that can be directed rather than something that simply happens to him.

That is the part worth taking, and it does not depend at all on what he was looking at. A man who can ask for his eyes to be turned away from one thing is a man who understands that an eye is steerable.

You have eyes that can be aimed on purpose, and the looking away you have been doing was never once permanent. Psalm 119:37 treats sight as something directed rather than automatic, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns an eye that has been pointed somewhere else for a year.

And then the second half, which is the half that actually matters here. Quicken thou me in thy way. Make me alive. Wake me up.

He does not ask for more information. He asks to be made alive to what is already in front of him, which is a different request entirely and a much more honest one.

You were never short of information about that room, and what has gone quiet in there is aliveness rather than knowledge. The Spirit of God is the one who quickens a person to what has been sitting in plain view, and the written word asks for exactly that in Psalm 119:37 rather than asking for a better view.

What the trained blindness costs

So here is the practical claim, and it is the reason this row exists on this site at all.

A room you cannot describe cannot be worked on.

Every job needs a next step, and a next step is a specific thing about a specific surface. Not the room is not finished. The grout stops halfway along the second row. That is workable. The other one is a mood.

You are missing a next step and not a weekend, and a room described as unfinished has never once given anybody anywhere to start. Psalm 119:37 asks for the eyes to be turned before it asks for anything else, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a specific thing visible where a general dread has been standing.

And there is a second cost, and it is the one nobody expects.

The blindness spreads. You cannot narrow it to one wall. So the good things in that room go unseen too, and there are good things in it, and some of them you did yourself and have not thought about in months.

You have finished work in that room that has gone unseen along with everything else, and the skill you built to protect yourself has never once been able to sort the good from the bad. The Spirit of God is the one who gives back the whole room and not only the difficult half, and Psalm 119:37 asks to be quickened, which is a word about coming alive rather than about being corrected.

Say it out loud, item by item

Here is the assignment, and it will feel absurd, and absurd is what breaks a trained habit.

Stand in that room and describe it out loud. Out loud, with your actual voice, not in your head, because in your head is where the skill lives and it will simply smooth everything over again.

Start anywhere. The floor is done. The tiles stop about two thirds of the way along that wall. There is a strip of bare wall above the tiles. That shelf is up and it is straight. There is a box of the remaining tiles behind the door.

You have a voice that can put a room back into focus, and saying a plain thing out loud has never once required anybody else to be listening. Psalm 119:37 asks for the eye to be turned and for the person to be quickened, and the Holy Spirit is the one in that room while a woman narrates her own bathroom to nobody.

Keep going until you run out. That is the whole measure. Not until it hurts, not until you have made a list of jobs, just until there is nothing left to say.

And notice what you say about the parts that are finished, because you will find that you say more about them than you expected to.