The Door At The End Of The Hall

Your head turns slightly.

That is the thing you have never noticed yourself doing. You walk down that hall a dozen times a day and about four feet before the end your head turns a few degrees to the left, and you carry on past.

It is not dramatic. Nobody watching would see it. And it happens every single time.

The door at the end of the hall has been closed since the spring.

And here is what is strange about the way people talk about rooms like that. They talk about going in as though it were one event, a threshold moment, a day you finally do it.

That is not what a door at the end of a hall is. It is not an event. It is twelve small avoidances a day, every day, for months, and the cumulative weight of those is the actual thing you are carrying.

Nobody talks about the twelve. Everybody talks about the one big entry.

So today I am not going to ask you for the big entry, and I am going to say something about what happens in the middle of a hard thing, because that is where you actually live and nobody writes about it.

When you pass through, He is in there too

There is a promise in Isaiah that is unusual for where it puts God.

When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee. (Isaiah 43:2, King James Version)

When thou passest through. Not before. Not after. During.

The promise is not that the water is removed and it is not that you are lifted over it. It is company in the middle, which is a much stranger and more useful thing to promise.

You are accompanied through the middle of it, and the middle has never once been a place you were sent alone. Isaiah 43:2 puts the presence inside the passage rather than at either end, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with a woman whose head turns four feet before the end of a hall.

And notice what that does to the twelve avoidances a day.

Under the big entry idea, those twelve are twelve failures while you wait for the real moment. Under this verse, the twelve are the passage, and He is described as being in there with you for every single one of them.

You have been accompanied through twelve small crossings a day, and not one of them has ever once been unattended. The written word gives the company to the middle of the water, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a woman doing something twelve times a day that she has never noticed doing.

The twelve are the thing

Let me be specific about the cost, because nobody has ever counted it.

Twelve times a day, for about five months, is roughly eighteen hundred small turnings away. Each one costs almost nothing. Eighteen hundred of almost nothing is not almost nothing.

That is why you are tired in a way that does not match your week. It is not the door. It is the eighteen hundred.

You are tired from something you never once counted, and the tiredness has never once been out of proportion. Isaiah 43:2 describes the passing through as the actual location of the promise, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land for a woman who cannot work out why an ordinary week wears her out.

And this is where the big entry idea actively hurts you.

Because it makes the twelve invisible. If the only thing that counts is the day you go in and deal with it, then everything you are actually doing, which is passing that door and carrying it and getting on with your life, is unrecorded and does not count.

You have been doing something unrecorded twelve times a day, and it has never once failed to count with God. The written word fixes its promise to the passage itself, and the Spirit of God is the one who steadies a woman whose real work has been invisible since the spring.

Two minutes, and nothing moved

So here is today, and it is deliberately not an entry.

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

You are going in with nothing required of you in there, and going in has never once obliged you to begin. Isaiah 43:2 promises company through the water and never a task on the far side, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman standing in a room at the end of her own hall.

And notice what the two minutes does about the twelve.

After it, the door is a room you have stood in rather than a room you have not been in since the spring. The head still might turn. But it turns past something known, and something known costs less than something avoided, every single time.

You are turning a not been in since the spring into a stood in on a Tuesday, and that change has never once required a single box to move. The written word keeps the presence inside the passage, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that land for a woman walking out of a room having touched nothing.