I Clear The Room For Nobody

Every night at about half past nine the room goes back.

Cushions. The blanket folded. The things on the floor picked up and taken out. The coffee table cleared. The whole room returned, in about eleven minutes, to the state it was in before anybody was in it.

And it happens every single night, and it has for years, and nobody in that house has ever asked you to do it.

I want to ask the question that the eleven minutes never gets asked.

Who is it for?

Because it is not for the morning. Nobody comes down at seven and admires it. It is not for your family, who would be entirely content to come down to the room they left. And it is not for visitors, who come perhaps twice a month and never in the morning.

It is for a state. The room has a correct condition, and every night it gets returned to that condition, and the condition is defined by a room with nobody in it.

Which means every evening, the last act of the day is the removal of the evidence that your family was together.

When thou sittest in thine house

There is an instruction in Deuteronomy about talking to children and the setting it names is worth noticing.

And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. (Deuteronomy 6:7, King James Version)

When thou sittest in thine house. That is the first setting on the list.

You are given a room to sit in with your household as the first place named, and a house with people sitting in it has never once been in the wrong condition. Deuteronomy 6:7 puts sitting in the house at the head of the settings, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says so to a woman at half past nine.

Now look at the whole list, because every item on it is an ordinary moment.

Sitting in the house. Walking on the road. Lying down. Getting up.

Not one of those is an occasion. There is no arranged event anywhere in that verse. The whole of what is being described happens in the unremarkable run of a day, in a house that people are in, and the instruction assumes a household that is sitting rather than one that is passing through.

You have a household described as sitting rather than resetting, and the ordinary run of an evening has never once been the wrong setting for what matters most. The Spirit of God is the one who works through the unremarkable hours of a house, and it is written in Deuteronomy 6:7 that sitting in the house comes first on the list.

What the reset teaches

Now the practical part, and it is about what the room is saying rather than about the eleven minutes.

Your children are watching a room get returned to a state that excludes them, every night, for years.

Nobody tells them that. Nobody has to. A child who has watched an adult remove the traces of an evening, nightly, has learned that the presence of the family in a room is a temporary condition and the empty room is the real one.

And they will not remember the eleven minutes. They will remember which state the room defaulted to.

You are teaching a household which condition of a room is the real one, and a room reset nightly has never once said anything except that empty is correct. The Holy Spirit is the one who shows a woman what her own house has been teaching, and Deuteronomy 6:7 assumes a household sitting in a house rather than restoring one.

And there is a cost to you, and it is worth naming because nobody ever does.

The last eleven minutes of your day are spent working. Alone. After everybody else has finished.

Every single evening for years has ended with a woman on her own in a front room, undoing the day, and that is the note the day closes on, and it closes on it every time.

You are entitled to end an evening in it rather than after it, and eleven minutes alone at the end of a day has never once been a rest. The Spirit of God is the one who is present with a woman at half past nine, and it is written in Deuteronomy 6:7 that the setting is a house being sat in.

And this, plainly, in these words. That room is not a report on you. Not on your standards, not on your care, not on how you keep a house. A room that gets reset nightly is not a verdict on the woman doing it, and I am not going to allow it to be read that way while she is folding a blanket at half past nine.

You are a woman whose worth was settled a long way from a front room, and how a house is kept has never once been a statement about who lives in it. Deuteronomy 6:7 puts the sitting first in Deuteronomy 6, and the same Spirit who inspired that line is in the room with you.

One thing left, still there in the morning

So here is the assignment, and this is the close of the whole seven, so it is the smallest one in the series on purpose.

Leave one thing your own family left out tonight exactly where it is, and let it still be there in the morning.

One thing. Not the room. One thing that one of them put down, wherever they put it. A cup, a game, a coat over the arm, a book face down on the couch.

Leave it. Do the other ten minutes if you want them. But that one thing stays exactly where it landed.

You are able to leave one trace of your own household in a room, and one cup left where a person put it has never once undone a house. The Holy Spirit is the one at work when a woman leaves one piece of evidence in her own front room, and Deuteronomy 6:7 names a house being sat in as the first setting.

And then the morning, which is the whole of it.

Let it still be there in the morning.

Because the reset happens at night and the room is met in the morning, and a room met in the morning with one thing of a family's still in it is a room that says people live here. And a room met with nothing in it says the day starts from empty.

You will want to move it at seven. That will be strong and it will be about four seconds long. Put the kettle on and let it be there.

And whoever left it will come down and see their own thing still where they put it, and they will not say anything at all, and that is the whole message and it does not need one word.

You are letting a morning open with the evidence that a family lives here, and one thing still there at seven has never once said less than eleven minutes of work. The Spirit of God is the one present at seven in the morning in a room that was not undone, and it is written in Deuteronomy 6:7 that the first setting named is a household sitting in its own house.