The Bed In There Is Always Made

There is a room in your house where the bed is always made.

It has been made since the last time somebody stayed, which was a while ago now. The pillows are square. The cover is straight. There is nothing on the floor and nothing on the chair, because nobody has put anything down in there in months.

You go in about every couple of weeks to check nothing has gone wrong, and you look at it from the doorway, and it looks exactly as it did the last time, and you close the door again.

Here is the strange part, and I think you already know it.

That is the tidiest room in your house, and it is the only one you have no relationship with.

Every other room has stuff in it that tells you somebody lives here. A cup somebody left. A pair of shoes at an angle. A jacket over the back of something. Those are the marks of a life going on, and you have been trained for about forty years to read them as untidiness, and they are not. They are evidence.

That room has no evidence in it at all.

So we are going to put one piece of evidence in there tonight. That is the whole assignment, and it is smaller than a project and larger than it sounds.

There was no room for them

There is a sentence in Luke that everybody knows and almost nobody hears.

And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn. (Luke 2:7, King James Version)

No room for them in the inn.

We have been trained to hear that as a story about a hard-hearted innkeeper, and it may not have been that at all. It is a sentence about capacity. Whatever the building was, its rooms were spoken for, and a family that needed one was outside of it.

Now turn that around and look at your own house.

You have a room. It is warm, it is dry, the bed is made, and it is spoken for by nobody. It is not being kept from anyone in particular. It is held and nothing more.

You are living in a house with more room in it than your household is using, and a room held in reserve has never once been the same thing as a room being kept safe. Luke 2:7 turns on whether there was space for a family, and the Holy Spirit is the one who asks a quiet question in a hallway about the space a man already has.

And notice what happened when the room was not available.

They used what there was. A feeding trough, a stable, whatever the arrangement actually was, and the whole of the thing that has mattered most in the history of the world happened in a space nobody had prepared for it.

Which says something about what a room needs to be before it counts, and the answer is: much less than we think.

You have a room that is ready by any standard that heaven has ever used, and the finish on a space has never once been the thing that made it fit for a life. The Spirit of God is the one who filled an unprepared stable, and it is written in Luke 2:7 that the most important night in history happened in a room nobody had made up.

What a made bed is actually for

Let me say something about why that bed is made, because it comes from somewhere decent.

It is made so that if somebody needed to come, they could come tonight. That is hospitality, held in a state of readiness, and it is a good instinct and I am not going to talk you out of it.

But hold the two things side by side. A room kept ready for a person who might come. And a room that nobody in the house has spent an hour in for eight months.

One of those is generosity. The other one is a room slowly going out of the house.

You are running a generous house already, and a door left shut has never once been the price of hospitality. The Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a home open without emptying it of the people who live there, and Luke 2:7 measures a place by whether a family found room in it.

Because a room that is never entered stops being part of a home. It becomes storage that happens to contain a bed. The air changes. The door starts to feel like the edge of the house rather than a way into more of it.

You are the head of a house that reaches all the way to the far wall of that room, and a closed door has never once redrawn the borders of a home. Luke 2:7 is a sentence about which spaces are available to a family, and the Holy Spirit is the one who walks a man back through a door he has been checking from the outside.

And here is the part I want to be careful and plain about.

Nothing in this is a rebuke about keeping the room nice. A made bed is not a fault. The state of that room is not a report on the man who keeps it, and I am not going to pretend otherwise for the sake of a point.

What I am saying is that the room is presently useful to a person who has not arrived, and useless to the four people who live here, and that balance can shift tonight without a single thing being thrown away.

You are able to keep a room ready and still live in it, and hospitality has never once required a room to be empty of the people who own it. The Spirit of God is the one who keeps a house generous without making it a museum, and Luke 2:7 measures a room by whether there was space for a family in it.

One ordinary thing, left behind

So here is the assignment.

Sit on the edge of that made bed for ten minutes tonight, and leave one ordinary thing of yours in the room when you go.

Sit on the bed. Yes, on it. That is the part that will feel wrong, because the cover is straight and sitting on it will make a dent, and the dent is exactly the point.

Ten minutes. Put the lamp on. Let the room be a room with a man in it.

You are allowed to make a dent in your own bedcover, and a straight cover has never once been worth more than a house with all its rooms in use. It is written in Luke 2:7 that a family found the space they needed in a place nobody had straightened, and the Holy Spirit is the one sitting on the edge of that bed with a man who feels faintly ridiculous.

Then, before you go, leave one ordinary thing behind.

A book that is actually being read. A jacket over the chair. The radio you never listen to anywhere else. A cup, even. One object that belongs to a living person and is not there for a guest.

Not a decoration. Something in use.

And then leave the door open when you go to bed, and do not go back in and fix the cover.

You are leaving evidence that somebody lives in this whole house, and one object with a person attached to it has never once been clutter in a room that had none. The Spirit of God is the one who fills a room by ordinary means, and Luke 2:7 puts the weight of the whole scene on whether there was space in a house for a life to happen.