Nobody Has Been In Your House

Four years in September.

Not a meal. Not a coffee. Nobody has crossed that doorstep except the man who read the meter and your sister, once, in the second year, and she stood in the hall.

You would not describe yourself as somebody who does not have people round. If anybody asked you would say that things have been busy, and that you have been meaning to, and both of those are the kind of true that keeps a thing standing for four years.

Here is the actual arithmetic, and you have never done it out loud.

To have somebody in, properly, the way you would want to, the hall would need doing. The room at the back would need to be cleared, and the clearing of it is not a morning, it is a decision about a great many things that belong to somebody who is not here any more. The kitchen needs a whole day. There is the thing with the boiler.

That is somewhere between eleven and fourteen days of work.

And you do not have eleven days, so it does not happen, so the number grows, because things do not stay still. Four years ago it was about four days.

So it is not that you have stopped inviting people. It is that a standard grew past a threshold, quietly, without any decision, and shut your own front door.

The word in the parable is compel and it is not about force

There is a moment in a story Jesus tells where a supper is prepared and the invited guests will not come, and the master sends his servant out twice, and the second instruction has a word in it that startles people.

And the lord said unto the servant, Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.Luke 14:23

Compel them.

It sounds like force and it is not. The people in the highways and hedges are not resisting the invitation because they do not want to come. They are resisting it because they cannot believe it is meant for them, and a person in that state has to be pressed past their own refusal or they will politely decline a real feast.

That is the whole meaning of the word there. It is what you do with somebody who is saying no out of unworthiness rather than out of preference.

So take this now, four years in. You are wanted at a table that is already laid. The written word puts a master sending a servant back out to press past exactly the kind of no you have been giving, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does that pressing, and there is nothing in that story about a house being ready.

And here is the turn in it that matters for you. In that parable, the guests do not host anything. The house being filled is somebody else's house.

The standard is not high, it is old

Now let me say what I think is actually going on, because you are not a person who cares about impressing anybody and I would not insult you by suggesting it.

Where I come from, a house is opened without warning and the food is whatever there is, and nobody apologizes for a room. That is the oldest hospitality there is and it is in your bones somewhere, and it is not the thing that has closed your door.

What has closed it is that the back room has your father's things in it.

Everything else on that list is real and none of it is the reason. The hall could be done in an afternoon and you know it. The number is eleven to fourteen days because the back room is in the number, and the back room is not a room, it is a decision you are not ready to make, and it has been sitting inside your hospitality arithmetic for four years pretending to be a job.

You do not have to clear that room to let somebody in. His word has a table already laid and a servant sent out to press past your no, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting on a decision about your father's things.

The plain hall and what it did not require

In 1895 a man named Phineas Bresee opened a hall near the middle of Los Angeles and made one decision about it that people still repeat: not one seat in it could be rented.

The gift in that was not only the money. It was that there was nothing to get ready.

In a room where the good places are bought, arriving requires arrangement, and everybody arranges, and the arranging is invisible and constant and it wears people out. Bresee's room asked for nothing at the door, and the people who came in off those streets came in exactly as that day had left them.

And that hall was famous for its suppers, and everything about the accounts of them suggests they were not impressive. Long tables and whatever there was.

Your door has a standard on it that nobody else set, and the written word has a servant sent out to press past a polite no, and the Holy Spirit has been standing on that step for four years.