It Was Going To Be For Something

There is a door in your house you do not open.

It is not locked. Nothing dramatic is behind it. There is a room in there, and the room has almost nothing in it, and the reason you keep going past it is that it was going to be for something.

You know what. I do not. It might have been a nursery. It might have been a study for work that did not come. It might have been for somebody who was going to move in. It might have been the room where a thing was going to happen that did not happen.

Whatever it was, the room has been holding the shape of it for a while now.

And I want to say at once that keeping that door shut is not avoidance in the ordinary sense. You are not being weak about it. A person who has wanted something badly does not walk casually into the space that was set aside for it, and pretending otherwise would be a lie about how people work.

But I want to name what the shut door is actually doing, because it is doing two things and only one of them is the one you intended.

It is protecting you from walking into the middle of a disappointment on an ordinary Tuesday. That is the one you intended, and it works.

The other one is that a room in your house has been taken out of service for years, and every day the shut door makes the thing that did not happen slightly more the permanent identity of that space.

Tonight we are going to do the smallest possible thing about the second one, without touching the first.

Hope deferred maketh the heart sick

There is a proverb about this that is unusually honest, and the honesty is the useful part.

Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life. (Proverbs 13:12, King James Version)

Read the first half again, because most people skip past it to get to the second half.

Hope deferred makes the heart sick. That is not a warning. It is a description. It is Scripture stating, without comment or correction, that waiting for something that does not come does damage to a person, and it does not tell anybody to feel differently about that.

You are carrying something the written word calls sickness rather than failure, and a long wait has never once been evidence of anything wrong in the person waiting. Proverbs 13:12 names the damage without blaming the one it happens to, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says that plainly to a woman standing outside a shut door.

That matters more than it sounds. There is a whole industry of people who will tell you to feel better about a deferred hope, and here is the Bible saying, in one line, that it makes the heart sick, full stop, no correction offered.

Nothing here has been indulgence. The thing being carried is heavy, and Scripture agrees that it is heavy.

Now the second half, and I want to be careful here, because this is exactly where people get careless.

When the desire comes, it is a tree of life. That is a real sentence and I am not going to soften it. And I am also not going to stand here and tell you that yours is coming, or when, because I do not know that and nobody who tells you they do knows it either.

You have a God who does not require you to pretend the waiting is easy, and an honest description of a heavy thing has never once been the same as unbelief about it. The Spirit of God is the one who holds a person inside a deferral without demanding a performance, and it is written in Proverbs 13:12 that the heart goes sick and that the sentence stops there.

A room can hold two things

Here is the thing I actually came to say, and it is a small distinction that changes a lot.

Using that room does not close the first purpose.

That is the fear underneath the shut door, and it is worth pulling out into the light. There is a sense that putting anything else in there is a kind of announcement. That it says out loud that the thing is not going to happen. That it is a surrender performed with furniture.

It is not. A room is not a vote.

You are able to put a chair in a room without making a declaration about the future, and a second use for a space has never once canceled the first one. The Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person live in the meantime without ruling on the outcome, and Proverbs 13:12 talks about a desire that comes without saying when or how.

And here is the other half of it.

That room is currently useful to nobody, including the hope. Standing empty does not hold a place for anything. Nothing is being preserved by the emptiness, and no future is closer because the room is bare.

The only thing an empty room reliably produces is a house that is one room smaller.

You have a house that is bigger than the doors you open, and an unused room has never once been the same thing as a room being kept. The Spirit of God is the one who moves a woman across a threshold she has been going past, and it is written in Proverbs 13:12 that the deferral itself is the thing doing damage.

And one more, plainly, because it needs to be said in these words.

An empty room in your house is not a report on you. It is not a mark of what did not work out or what you failed to bring about. Whatever did not happen was not withheld because of something lacking in you, and I am not going to let the door be read that way while we are standing at it.

You are a woman whose worth was settled somewhere other than in what arrived, and a closed door has never once been a verdict on the person behind it. The written word describes the sickness of a deferred hope without one word of blame in Proverbs 13:12, and the same Spirit who inspired that line is standing at the door with you.

Ten minutes, and one thing carried in

So here is the assignment, and it is deliberately mild.

Sit in that room for ten minutes tonight and carry in one thing from the rest of the house that you use every day.

Sit down in there. On the floor if there is nothing to sit on. Ten minutes on a clock, with the light on.

The feeling will arrive early. Let it be there. You are not settling anything tonight and I am not going to pretend that ten minutes on a floor resolves a thing that has been waiting for years.

You are able to sit inside a disappointment for ten minutes without it deciding anything, and being in a room has never once required a person to be finished grieving it. The Holy Spirit is the one sitting on that floor with a woman, and Proverbs 13:12 says the heart goes sick in a deferral and offers no correction to the one carrying it.

Then, before you get up, carry in one thing from the rest of the house that gets used.

Not a decoration. Something in daily service. The chair you actually read in. The clothes drier rack. The basket of things that has never had anywhere to live. A lamp from a room with two.

Something that means a person will now have a reason to walk through that door on an ordinary day without thinking about it first.

That is the whole mechanism. Give the room a small daily job, and the door stops being a decision.

You are giving a room something ordinary to do, and one useful object has never once been a statement about anything that has not arrived. The Spirit of God is the one at work in an unremarkable act on an ordinary evening, and it is written in Proverbs 13:12 that a desire coming is a tree of life, which says nothing at all about what a room does in the meantime.