The Hour Before They Arrive

They are due at seven and you start at six.

That hour has a shape and you know it exactly. It moves fast. It goes room by room. It is not cleaning exactly, it is a kind of scanning and correcting, and it uses everything you have.

By ten to seven you are hot, slightly breathless, and standing in the middle of the front room doing a final pass with your eyes.

And then the door goes, and you open it, and the person on the other side of it is met by somebody who has just run a race.

I want to name what that hour costs, because the cost is not the hour.

The cost is that you are spent before the evening starts. The first thirty minutes of every visit you host is conducted by a woman who is recovering, and by nine you are wondering why hosting takes so much out of you, and this is why. Not the visit. The hour.

And here is the thing that will be hardest to hear and is the most true.

The hour does not work.

Not in the sense that the room does not improve. It improves. In the sense that not one of your guests has ever noticed the difference between the room at six and the room at ten to seven, because they were not there at six and have nothing to compare it to.

The hour is performed for a person who cannot see it, and it is paid for by the person who does it.

Be still, and know

There is a line everybody has on a card somewhere, and almost nobody has read the sentence around it.

Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth. (Psalm 46:10, King James Version)

Be still. In the Hebrew it carries the sense of letting the hands drop. Ceasing from activity. Stopping the doing.

You are told to let your hands drop and told nothing at all about the room, and a stillness has never once had to be earned by finishing something first. Psalm 46:10 puts the instruction into stopping rather than into completing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says so to a woman at ten to seven.

Now look at where that verse sits, which is the part nobody reads.

The whole psalm before it is chaos. The earth removed, the mountains carried into the sea, waters roaring, kingdoms moved. It is not a calm psalm and be still is not offered at the end of a settled afternoon.

It is spoken into a situation that is not finished, and it does not ask for the situation to be finished first.

You have permission to stop before anything is done, and a room in mid air has never once been a reason a person could not be still in it. The Spirit of God is the one who says be still into a psalm full of moving mountains, and it is written in Psalm 46:10 that the stopping comes before the knowing.

What they are actually arriving to

Let me put the seven o'clock moment from the other side, because it is worth seeing.

Your friend arrives. She has come to see you. She has had a week and she has been looking forward to this and she has thought about your front room exactly zero times since the last visit.

The door opens and there is a woman who is hot and slightly wired and talking a bit fast and asking her three questions at once while taking her coat.

That woman is lovely and that woman is also not quite there yet. It takes twenty minutes for her to arrive properly in her own evening, and by then a whole chunk of the visit is gone.

You are the thing your friend came for, and the first twenty minutes of an evening have never once been improved by an hour of correcting. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a person greets somebody as herself, and Psalm 46:10 puts the instruction into letting the hands drop.

And here is the practical arithmetic, and it is worth doing once.

The last twenty minutes of that hour are the least productive twenty minutes in it. Everything substantial happened between six and twenty past. The last twenty is scanning, adjusting, moving a thing and moving it back, and a final pass with the eyes that changes nothing at all.

That twenty minutes is where the heat and the breathlessness come from, and it is the twenty that produces the least.

You are able to give yourself back the least productive twenty minutes of an hour, and the last pass has never once been the part that changed anything. The Spirit of God is the one who ends a scanning that has stopped producing, and it is written in Psalm 46:10 that stillness is what is asked for.

And this, plainly, in these words. That house is not a report on you. Not on your standard, not on your effort, not on the life you have made in it. A room somebody spends an hour correcting is not a verdict on the woman correcting it, and I am not going to allow it to be read that way while she is standing in the middle of it at ten to seven.

You are a woman whose worth was settled a long way from a front room, and the state of a house has never once been a statement about who lives in it. Psalm 46:10 speaks into unfinished chaos in Psalm 46, and the same Spirit who inspired that line is in the room with you.

The last twenty minutes

So here is the assignment, and it is a subtraction rather than an addition.

Sit down for the last twenty minutes before they arrive and do nothing, and open the door exactly as things stand.

Keep the first forty if you want them. I am not taking the hour off you and I am not going to argue about whether the room matters, because it does matter to you and that is enough.

But at twenty to seven, stop. Sit down. In a chair, in the room, with the light on.

You are stopping twenty minutes before a door goes rather than at the sound of it, and twenty minutes of sitting has never once cost an evening anything it needed. The Holy Spirit is the one with a woman in a chair at twenty to seven with her hands in her lap, and Psalm 46:10 asks for the hands to drop while the situation is still moving.

You will find this very hard. Harder than the hour. The eye will keep finding things and the body will want to get up, and both of those will be strong for about the first six minutes.

Let them pass and stay in the chair. By seven you will have been sitting for twenty minutes, and a woman who has been sitting for twenty minutes opens a door differently from a woman who has only this second finished a final pass, and everybody on both sides of that door can feel the difference without being able to name it.

You are giving a friend the person she came for, and a woman who sat down for twenty minutes has never once been a worse host than one who was still moving. The Spirit of God is the one present in a chair in a lit room before a doorbell, and it is written in Psalm 46:10 that the stopping comes first and the knowing follows it.