A Stranger Has To Come Inside

Somebody is coming into your house on Tuesday and you cannot put it off.

Not a friend. Somebody official. A reading, a repair, a nurse for your mother, an assessment, a person with a form. Whoever it is, they have to come in, and it has to be inside, and there is no version of this that happens at the door.

And it has been sitting on you since the letter came.

Not the appointment itself. That part will take twenty minutes and it will be fine. What has been sitting on you is that a stranger is going to walk through your rooms and see them, and a stranger is not a friend, and a friend at least likes you first.

I want to be honest about something, because pretending would be no use to you.

Some of them do look. Not most, and not usually with any judgment in it, but some do, and one or two say something, and you have probably had one who did.

So I am not going to promise you a kind stranger. That is not mine to give.

What I am going to do is deal with the specific thing that makes Tuesday cost more than it should, which is that you have been preparing to be assessed since Monday, and the assessing may never happen, and the preparing is happening every day.

Thy going out and thy coming in

There is a psalm about doorways and it is more literal than people usually take it.

The LORD shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore. (Psalm 121:8, King James Version)

Going out and coming in. That is a phrase about a threshold, and it covers movement in both directions across it.

You are covered on both sides of your own door, and a threshold has never once been the edge of where God was paying attention. Psalm 121:8 puts the preserving on the going out and the coming in, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says so to a woman with a date on the calendar.

Now look at the range on it, because the psalm is unusually specific about how long.

From this time forth, and even for evermore. Not for the good weeks. Not for the appointments that are going to go well. From now, onward, without a gap in it, including a Tuesday morning with somebody official due at eleven.

That means the preserving is already in place on Tuesday. It is not something to be arranged. It is the standing condition of that doorway.

You have a door that is already covered on Tuesday, and a coming in has never once been outside what that psalm was talking about. The Spirit of God is the one who is at a threshold in both directions, and it is written in Psalm 121:8 that the preserving runs from this time forth and forevermore.

What the days before are costing

Now the thing I actually came for, which is the days rather than the appointment.

The appointment is twenty minutes. The dread is six days.

And in those six days a specific thing happens, and it is worth naming because it is the part that can actually change. The whole week is being lived inside an imagined version of Tuesday in which somebody is assessing the house. In the imagined version they always are. That is the nature of the imagined version.

So you get assessed about forty times before anybody rings the bell, and every one of those is unpleasant, and not one of them corresponds to anything that has happened.

You are able to stop being assessed by somebody who has not arrived, and a stranger in an imagined room has never once been an actual event. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes a person out of a week that has not happened, and Psalm 121:8 covers the actual coming in rather than the rehearsed one.

And here is the practical thing, and it is the most useful sentence in this article.

The person coming on Tuesday is at work.

That is the whole of it. They have a job with a number of appointments in it and yours is one of them and there is another one after it. They are thinking about the form, the time, the next address, and whether they will get lunch. Your front room is the eleventh front room they have been in this week and they will not remember it by Thursday.

That is not coldness. It is the ordinary reality of somebody doing a job, and it is enormously in your favor.

You are one line on somebody's list rather than the subject of their morning, and an ordinary working visit has never once been a hearing. The Holy Spirit is the one who puts a stranger back into proportion, and Psalm 121:8 preserves the coming in as well as the going out with no gap in it.

You are one appointment in somebody's Tuesday, and a person at work has never once been conducting the inspection a person at home is bracing for. The Spirit of God is the one who puts a stranger back into ordinary proportion, and it is written in Psalm 121:8 that the going out and the coming in are both preserved.

And this, plainly, in these words. That house is not a report on you. Not on your circumstances, not on your health, not on what has been happening in the years that made the house what it is. A room a stranger walks through is not a verdict on the woman who lives in it, and I am not going to allow it to be read that way while she is waiting for a knock.

You are a woman whose worth was settled a long way from a living room, and what an official sees on a Tuesday has never once been a statement about who you are. Psalm 121:8 covers the whole threshold in Psalm 121, and the same Spirit who inspired that line is in the house with you.

Stay in the room

So here is the assignment, and the second half is the one that will surprise you.

Let them in at the time they are due without doing anything extra to the room, and stay in the room with them rather than leaving them to it.

First half. Nothing extra. Whatever you normally do on a Tuesday morning, do that. No additional hour, no special pass, no getting up early.

That will be difficult and I am not going to pretend otherwise, because the pull will be strong and the pull has been building since Monday.

You are able to let a Tuesday be a Tuesday, and an appointment has never once required a house to be different from how it is on a Tuesday. The Holy Spirit is the one with a woman on the morning of a thing she has been dreading, and Psalm 121:8 puts the preserving on the coming in itself.

Second half, and this is the one that changes how it feels.

Stay in the room with them.

The instinct is the opposite. The instinct is to let them in, point at the thing, and go and be busy in the kitchen, because being in the room while somebody looks at your house is the specific thing that hurts.

But going into the kitchen leaves them alone in your front room with nobody in it, and it turns you into somebody hiding in her own house, and that feeling lasts long after they have gone.

Stay. Offer a drink. Ask a normal question. Be a woman in her own living room while somebody does their job in it.

You are staying in your own front room while somebody works in it, and being present has never once been a harder thing to carry than hiding in a kitchen. The Spirit of God is the one who steadies a woman who stays where she is, and it is written in Psalm 121:8 that the going out and the coming in are preserved from this time forth.