My Walls Are Bare Because Nothing Goes

There is a drawer in your house with things in it that should be on a wall.

Photographs, mostly. A couple of framed things somebody gave you. Something from a trip. Maybe a thing your child made that got taken down when you moved and never went back up.

They have been in there for years, and the reason is not that you forgot.

The reason is that you have looked at them, several times, and thought: none of this goes together. Different frames. Different sizes. One is a photograph and one is a print and one is a thing on a bit of wood. Put them all up and it will look like a mess, and a bare wall does not look like a mess, so the drawer stays shut.

That is a real piece of reasoning and it is not stupid. It is genuinely true that they do not go together.

What is not true is the conclusion.

The conclusion assumes that the only two options are a coherent arrangement or nothing, and that of those two, nothing is the safer choice. And I want to spend fifteen minutes on that assumption, because it is the thing keeping four years of your life in a drawer.

Then tonight we are going to get three of them out and stand them against a wall, and nothing is going into a wall, and nobody needs anybody's permission.

The Lord looketh on the heart

There is a line from the day David was chosen that everybody knows and almost nobody applies to a house.

But the LORD said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature, because I have refused him: for the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart. (1 Samuel 16:7, King James Version)

The context is worth having. Samuel is looking at a row of brothers and getting it wrong, repeatedly, because he is reading the outside.

You are known by a God who does not read a room the way a person reads one, and an outward arrangement has never once been what He was looking at. 1 Samuel 16:7 says plainly that He does not see the way man sees, and the Holy Spirit is the one who applies that to a man standing at a drawer.

Now, I want to be careful, because there is a lazy version of this and I am not preaching it.

The lazy version says appearances do not matter, so do not think about it. That is not what the verse says and it is not what I am saying. Appearances matter. You would not be standing at that drawer if they did not.

What the verse does is settle where the weight goes. And once the weight is off the outward appearance, a strange freedom shows up: if the arrangement is not what is being assessed, then it does not have to be right before it can exist.

You have permission to put something up before it is right, and an arrangement has never once had to be finished to be allowed. The Spirit of God is the one who takes the assessment out of a room, and it is written in 1 Samuel 16:7 that the Lord looks at the heart rather than at the outward appearance.

Bare is not neutral

Here is the part I actually came to say, and it is the piece of the reasoning that is wrong.

Bare is not neutral. That is the whole mistake.

An empty wall has been treated as the safe default, the zero, the state that says nothing. It is not. An empty wall in a room where somebody has lived for four years says something quite specific, and everybody who comes in reads it without meaning to.

It says nobody has settled here. It says this is a place somebody is staying.

You are living in a room that is already saying something, and a bare wall has never once been the option that says nothing. The Holy Spirit is the one who shows a man what his own room is communicating, and 1 Samuel 16:7 puts the real reading of a person somewhere other than the surface.

So the choice was never between a mess and nothing. It was between one thing that reads as unsettled and another thing that reads as a man who put his own photographs up.

And of those two, the mismatched one wins, and it is not close.

You are able to make a room say something true about the people in it, and three unmatched frames have never once been worse than four years of an empty wall. The Spirit of God is the one who settles a person into where they actually live, and it is written in 1 Samuel 16:7 that the outward appearance is not where the reading happens.

And this, plainly, because it needs saying in these words.

An empty wall in that room is not a report on you. Not on your taste, not on whether you have a good eye, not on whether you are the kind of man who is good at this. A drawer of things nobody has put up is not a verdict on the man who owns them, and I am not going to let it be read that way while he is opening it.

You are a man whose worth was settled a long way from a wall, and what is or is not hanging in a room has never once been a statement about who lives there. 1 Samuel 16:7 puts the seeing on the heart in 1 Samuel 16, and the same Spirit who inspired that line is standing at the drawer with you.

Three of them, standing up

So here is the assignment, and it involves no tools and no holes.

Stand three things you own against the wall on one surface tonight, and leave them there without straightening them.

Open the drawer. Take out three. Do not spend twenty minutes choosing, and do not try to pick three that go together, because the whole point of tonight is that they do not.

Stand them along the top of the bookcase, or the back of a shelf, or the mantel if there is one, leaning against the wall. Overlapping slightly is good. Standing at slightly different angles is good.

You are putting your own life into your own room by hand, and three leaning frames have never once needed a hole in a wall to count as up. The Holy Spirit is the one at work when a man decides something about his own house, and 1 Samuel 16:7 takes the assessment off the outward appearance entirely.

Then the second half, and it is the hard one.

Leave them without straightening them.

You will want to. The impulse will arrive about ninety seconds later and it will be strong. Straightening is what a man does when he is trying to make an arrangement pass, and passing is the thing we have just taken off the table.

Leave them slightly off. Go to bed.

You are letting a room be un-straightened on purpose, and a leaning photograph has never once been the difference between a home and a failure. The Spirit of God is the one present when a man stops arranging his own house for an inspection, and it is written in 1 Samuel 16:7 that the Lord does not see as man sees.