The Door I Stopped Answering

There is a spot in her hallway, about three feet in from the door, where the person outside cannot see her through the glass.

She found it by accident in February and now she goes to it without thinking. She hears the gate, she is in the hall before the knock lands, and she stands in that spot with her keys in her hand and her breathing shallow like a girl hiding in a game, until whoever it is gives up and goes back down the path.

Sometimes it is the boy collecting for the school trip. Sometimes it is the woman from two streets over who wants a lift on Wednesday and who always, always says it will only take twenty minutes. Sometimes it is family. Twice it has been somebody with a parcel, and she has stood there anyway, because by the time she works out it is a parcel she is already standing.

This is not who she is. That is the whole problem. This is a woman who ran the food table at that church for six years. Who has fed people out of a cupboard that could not carry it. Who once gave a woman she barely knew her own coat in a car park in November and walked to the bus in a cardigan and thought nothing of it.

And now she stands in a hallway with the light off.

Because everybody who comes wants something. Every single one. And there is nothing in the tank, not a drop, and she cannot say that out loud to a person on her doorstep, so she has started making sure there is no person on her doorstep.

You know that hallway. Yours might be a phone you look at and put back down. It might be a message you have read four times and not answered. It might be a road you walk on the other side of now. You are not a cold person. You are a person who has given until the giving started coming out of somewhere it should not have come from, and something in you has slammed shut to stop the bleeding.

Come in and sit down and let somebody else make it. I am not here to ask you for anything, and I want to read you one line that has been badly used on women like you, and read it properly this time.

There is no code, and there is a corner left standing

Let me say the plain thing before anything else, because the name over the door of this site promises a secret and I am not going to hold an exhausted woman with a hint of one.

There is no code. Nothing you put in anybody's hand unlocks anything. There is no arrangement of Scripture about money that pays a woman back for her coat in a car park in November, and I am not going to stand here and pretend there is, because you would know it was a lie and you have earned better than a lie.

And I am not going to tell you to give more. Hear that. This entire message will not add one thing to your load.

Here is the line, and it is from a chapter God wrote to people who were doing everything right on the outside and were dry on the inside.

Is it not to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the poor that are cast out to thy house? when thou seest the naked, that thou cover him; and that thou hide not thyself from thine own flesh?Isaiah 58:7

Now watch where that lands. Read the last clause again. Hide not thyself from thine own flesh. That is the clause I want in your hands tonight, because you have been reading this chapter as a list of duties for years, and it ends with the one thing you are actually doing, which is standing in a hall with the light off.

And He does not say it as an accusation. God, who knows exactly what is in your tank, names the hiding. He does not name the collection tin, or the lift on Wednesday, or the boy with the school trip. He names a person disappearing from her own doorway, and He calls it what it is: you, hidden from your own people.

You were never asked to empty yourself dry, and no part of Scripture makes your hands responsible for everybody who knocks. That is not a mercy I invented for a hard week. It is written into Isaiah 58, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a prophet's line and lays it gently across three feet of hallway carpet.

You have a God who sees what is left in you, and He has never once asked you for what you do not have. Scripture says He gives power to the faint, and to them that have no might He increases strength, and His Spirit is the one who takes a written line and puts it under a body that has been running on nothing since February.

Now let me say the hard true thing, because I love you too much to only be soft with you.

The reason you cannot open that door is that you have only got one setting. Open means everything. It has always meant everything. It meant the coat, and the cupboard, and six years of a food table, and if you open the door on Wednesday it will mean twenty minutes that turns into an afternoon, and you know it will, because it always has. So the hallway is not meanness. The hallway is the only brake you have ever been given.

And here is what the old harvest law knew that your one setting does not. God did not tell the farmer to give away his harvest. He told him to stop cutting at the corner. A boundary, not a bleeding. The field stays his. The corner was never counted. That is a completely different arrangement from the one you have been living under, and it is the one He actually wrote down.

You are not required to hand over the field, and one corner of it was never yours to count. Scripture puts the line on the edge of the field rather than through the middle of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can teach a hand to open partway when it has never in its life known how.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because a hallway does not change because somebody was kind to you over tea. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what enduring never does. So open your mouth in your own house. You have the standing to tell an emptiness in your own hall what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that your position rather than your service record, and the Holy Spirit carries a spoken word further than a front door.