Her Mother Is Coming On Sunday

She is coming on Sunday and you have known since Tuesday.

And something happens in a man in the days before a visit like that. It is not fear exactly. It is more like the low-grade readiness a person has before a thing they are going to be measured in, and it has been sitting in the back of the week since the plan was made.

There is a list forming in your head. Not a written one. The list of things she will see. The thing on the wall that is not finished. The chair. The room off the hallway. You have been walking through your own house as her for three days, which is a strange thing to do and almost every man does it.

I want to be honest about something before we go further, because the pretending version of this article would be useless.

She may well look. Some people do. She may notice something and say a version of something, and it may land exactly where it always lands.

I am not going to promise you a warm Sunday. That is not mine to give and anybody offering it is guessing.

What I am going to do is take one thing off the table, and it is the thing that actually costs you the afternoon.

An inspection needs two people. Somebody looking, and somebody standing there being looked at. And the second one is the part you have been supplying, every time, for eleven years, and it is the part that is yours to stop supplying.

Use hospitality one to another without grudging

There is an instruction in Peter about having people in that is short and strange and freeing.

Use hospitality one to another without grudging. (1 Peter 4:9, King James Version)

Grudging is the word. It means resentment carried into an act, doing the thing while something in you is objecting.

You are told to have people in without a grudge and told nothing at all about the room they walk into, and hospitality has never once been graded on the house. 1 Peter 4:9 attaches no standard to the setting, and the Holy Spirit is the one who points that out to a man on the Thursday before a Sunday.

Now look at what is not in that sentence, because the absence is enormous.

There is no requirement about the state of anything. No standard. No word about preparation. Peter had every opportunity to attach one and did not, and the entire instruction fits into six words.

Whatever hospitality is, in that verse, it is not an event a man passes or fails on the strength of his front room.

You have everything that instruction requires already standing in your house, and a room has never once been a condition on the thing God actually asked for. The Spirit of God is the one who takes an exam out of an afternoon, and it is written in 1 Peter 4:9 that the only thing named is the grudging.

The second person in an inspection

Now the part I actually came with.

An inspection has two roles, and one of them has been played in that hallway for eleven years by a man who was never cast in it.

The first role is looking. Somebody else may or may not be doing that, and it sits entirely outside anybody's control, and eleven years have gone into trying to manage it in advance by fixing things on Saturdays.

The second role is being on trial. Standing slightly wrong in your own hallway. Watching her eyes. Explaining the thing before she has looked at it. That role is filled by you, voluntarily, every time, and without it the whole event cannot take place.

You are able to decline a part in something rather than perform it well, and being looked at has never once obliged anybody to stand as if they were on trial. The Holy Spirit is the one who steadies a man in his own hallway, and 1 Peter 4:9 asks for hospitality without a grudge and stops there.

And here is the strange practical fact about this, which is worth more than any amount of preparation.

The looking mostly stops when the second role is empty. Not always, but mostly. A person who is scanning a room for a reaction and does not get one usually finds the scanning loses its interest within about twenty minutes.

That is not a technique for handling her. It is just what happens.

You are able to change the shape of a Sunday without managing anybody, and an afternoon has never once required both parts to be filled. The Spirit of God is the one present in a room where a man has stopped bracing, and it is written in 1 Peter 4:9 that the only thing forbidden in having somebody in is the grudge.

And this, plainly, because it is the ground the whole thing stands on.

That house is not a report on you. Not on your provision, not on your work, not on the life you have built for the people in it. A room that a man is nervous about is not a verdict on the man, and I am not going to let it be read that way while he is standing in his own hallway on a Sunday.

You are a man whose worth was settled a long way from that front room, and what a house looks like has never once been a statement about the man who keeps it. 1 Peter 4:9 leaves the setting entirely out of the instruction in 1 Peter 4, and the same Spirit who inspired that line is in the house with you.

Sunday, and your own chair

So here is the assignment, and it has two parts and the second one is the load-bearing one.

Let her in on Sunday without doing one thing to the room first, and sit down in your own chair before anybody else sits down.

First part. Nothing on Saturday. No jobs, no pre-emptive fixing, no walking the house as her. The room on Sunday is whatever the room is on a Sunday.

That will be harder than it sounds and you will find yourself doing something small on Saturday afternoon almost without deciding to. If that happens, stop when you notice, and do not make it a failure.

You are able to let a room be seen exactly as it is, and a house on an ordinary Sunday has never once needed a rehearsal. The Holy Spirit is the one who holds a man still on a Saturday, and 1 Peter 4:9 asks for hospitality without grudging and says nothing whatever about preparation.

Second part, and this is the real one.

When she comes in, sit down in your own chair before anybody else sits down.

Not last. Not after everybody is settled. Not hovering by the door waiting to see where the afternoon is going to go. Come in, sit down in the seat that is yours in your own house, and be a man sitting in his living room.

The body does the work here, and it does it faster than any decision. A man standing at the edge of his own room is in the second role. A man sitting in his own chair is not, and nobody has to say a word about it.

You are taking your own seat in your own house, and a chair has never once been a small thing in an afternoon a man has been bracing for since Tuesday. The Spirit of God is the one who settles a man into his own living room, and it is written in 1 Peter 4:9 that the instruction is about the grudge and nothing else.