I Have Not Been In There Properly For Two Years

You touch the handle about once a week.

Not to go in. To check that it is shut, which is a strange thing to be doing about a door in your own house, and you have never once asked yourself why you do it.

The room has boxes in it. Some are from the move, some are from before the move, and there is a chair in there that nobody has sat on since it went in.

Two years. That is the honest figure. Two years since you were properly in that room with the light on, looking at it.

And here is the thing that makes it worse rather than better: nothing terrible is in there.

No tragedy. Nothing you are frightened of. If somebody made you go in and describe the contents you could do it, item by item, without distress.

So you have concluded that the avoidance is stupid. That there is no reason for it and therefore it is a failure of an ordinary kind, and a man who cannot do a thing that has no reason to be hard is a man with something wrong with him.

That is the conclusion I want to take apart today, because it is wrong about what is actually in that room.

There is something in there and it is not in the boxes.

Put thou my tears into thy bottle

There is a line in Psalm 56 where David makes a request about something nobody else would think to keep.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book? (Psalm 56:8, King James Version)

Tellest means counts. God counts the wanderings, which is not the destinations but the moving about in between, the part that looks like nothing happening.

And then the tears, kept in a bottle, and written in a book. A double record of the part of a life that produces no result and that nobody else would log.

You are inside a record that counts the wandering as well as the arriving, and the wandering has never once gone unlogged. Psalm 56:8 puts the moving about and the weeping in the same verse and keeps both, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with a man who touches a handle once a week to check it.

Now here is why that verse belongs to that room.

Two years of avoiding a door produces nothing. There is no result to show, no progress, no story. It is the pure form of wandering, and it is exactly the category that verse says is being counted.

You have two years that are counted somewhere, and those two years have never once been empty in the only record that matters. The written word keeps the wanderings and the tears together, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a man who has decided that nothing has been happening in him.

Why it is hard when nothing in there is frightening

Let me say what is actually in that room, because it is not the boxes.

It is the decision. Every one of those boxes is an unmade decision, and a room with forty unmade decisions in it feels different from a room with forty boxes in it, and your body has been reading the room accurately.

You are not avoiding objects. You are avoiding a queue.

You have been standing outside a queue and never outside a room, and reading it that way has never once been irrational. Psalm 56:8 records the unproductive stretches as things God keeps, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land for a man who could describe every box in there without distress.

And that is why going in has been impossible while the rules are what they are.

Under the current rules, entering means starting. You have never separated those two, so every time your hand touches the handle your body correctly calculates that opening the door commits you to an afternoon you do not have and a queue of decisions you are not ready for.

You were correctly calculating the cost of something you never agreed to, and the calculation has never once been cowardice. The written word counts the wandering without asking for a result from it, and the Spirit of God is the one who steadies a man who has been calling his own accuracy a weakness.

Going in without starting

So here is today, and it exists to separate those two things for the first time.

Walk into the room. Stay for two minutes. Leave without moving anything.

Not one box. Not one item straightened, not one lid lifted, nothing put anywhere. Two minutes, standing, and then out.

You are able to go in and do nothing at all, and going in has never once obliged you to start. Psalm 56:8 keeps the unproductive time without requiring a result, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man standing in a room full of boxes with his hands in his pockets.

And I want to name what the two minutes is for, because it is not about the room.

It is a demonstration. It shows your body, which has been doing the calculation for two years, that entering and starting can be separated. Once they are separated, the handle stops costing what it costs.

You are showing your own body something it has never once been shown, and it has never once been able to learn it from an argument. The written word logs the moving about and asks nothing of it, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that land for a man standing still in a room for one hundred and twenty seconds.