I Opened The Door And Closed It Again

You get as far as the handle.

Sometimes further. Twice you have got the door open about a foot and then pulled it shut, and once you stood in the middle of the room for maybe forty seconds before you came out.

And every single one of those you have logged as a failure.

That is the word you use. You would not say it out loud, but it is the word, and after a while a man who fails at something eleven times stops attempting it, which is roughly where you are now.

So here is what I want to do today, and it is the whole of the article.

I want to change what those eleven attempts were.

They were not failures. Every one of them was a man going toward the hardest room in his house and getting as far as he could get on that particular day, and then coming back out under his own power.

Nobody who was not going to do it gets as far as the handle eleven times. A man avoiding something avoids the corridor.

She stood outside and she was allowed to

There is a moment in John where a woman gets close to something and stops, and the account treats that as entirely proper.

But Mary stood without at the sepulchre weeping: and as she wept, she stooped down, and looked into the sepulchre. (John 20:11, King James Version)

She stood without. Outside. She did not go in.

And what she did from out there was look in, weeping, and the text records it in that order and with that level of detail, and nobody in the passage suggests that she should have gone further.

You are standing outside it, and standing outside has never once been the same as failing to go in. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a man who has got as far as a handle eleven times, and John 20:11 records a woman stopping at the threshold and looking.

And now look at what happened from where she was.

Everything. She is the one who is spoken to. She is the one who is given the name. The whole account turns at the point where a woman was standing outside a place she could not enter, looking in and weeping.

You are in the position where things have been known to turn, and outside the door has never once been the wrong place to be found. The written word has a woman stand without and looks after her exactly where she is, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a man who has been calling eleven attempts eleven failures.

What the eleven attempts were

Let me re-file them properly, because the filing is the whole damage.

A failure is an attempt that produced nothing. Those eleven produced something every time: they found out where a man stood that day, at no cost, and he came back out intact.

That is information, and it is the only kind of information available about this, and it cannot be got any other way.

You were gathering something real each time, and not one of those eleven has ever once produced nothing. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a man who has been misfiling his own courage, and John 20:11 records a threshold and a looking as the whole of what a woman did.

And here is what the word failure has cost you specifically.

Eleven failures in a row means a man stops going down that corridor, and once he stops, the door becomes a thing he avoids rather than a thing he approaches, and the avoidance is a completely different situation from where you actually are.

You have been one word away from a completely different situation, and that word has never once been accurate. The written word leaves a woman standing outside and does not move her on, and the Spirit of God is the one who steadies a man who had almost stopped going upstairs.

One door, and the far side is optional

So here is today, and it has the same shape as the eleven.

Open the door. Look. Close it again.

That is the entire assignment and there is no version of it that involves going in, staying, or doing anything on the other side.

You are doing exactly what you have already done eleven times, and this time it has never once been a failure. The Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man with his hand on a handle on the landing, and John 20:11 has a woman stoop and look into a place she did not enter.

Here is the only difference, and it is the difference between eleven and twelve.

This one is on the list on purpose. Nobody is going up there hoping to get further. The trip is to open it, look, and close it, and the whole thing is complete the moment the door shuts.

The far side is not today's business and there is no day on which it becomes today's business by schedule.

You are completing something rather than attempting it, and completing it has never once required the far side. The written word records the standing outside as the thing that happened, and the Spirit of God is the one present with a man closing a door and going back down the stairs.