Two Years Of New Reasons

You have used the early start. You have used the headache twice, four months apart, which you were careful about. You have used the neighbor's dog, the car being in, the thing you had promised to finish, and a Tuesday that you invented entirely and then had to remember for a fortnight.

Two years. Every Sunday evening, in the same doorway, from the same three people, and every single week a new one.

That is the part that has started to frighten you. Not the declining. The invention. You are building them in advance now. You start putting one together somewhere around Thursday, and by Saturday you have it and you have tested it and you know which of the three is most likely to ask.

And this week you have nothing. You have genuinely got to the end of it. Every honest-shaped sentence has been used and the dishonest ones are all wearing thin, and you have thought, more than once in the last few days, that the simplest thing would be to not go on Sunday at all.

That is where this ends if nobody stops it, and it does not end there because you stopped loving God. It ends there because a woman can only manufacture so many sentences.

You know the real one. It is short. It is that the place they go afterwards is not a place you can go every week, and you would rather they never had to know that, and so you have spent two years protecting them from a fact and paying for the protection yourself.

Read what Jesus said about the guest list

He was at a meal in an important man's house when He said it, which is worth holding on to, because He said it to the host and not to the guests.

But when thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind: And thou shalt be blessed; for they cannot recompense thee.Luke 14:13

Look at the reason He gives. Because they cannot recompense thee.

That is not an unfortunate detail He is asking the host to overlook. It is the qualification. The whole blessing hangs on the guest not being able to return it, which means that any table where the returning matters has stopped being the kind of table He is talking about.

Sit in that a moment, because it dismantles two years of Thursday afternoons. You are not a difficulty at that table. You are the guest the instruction was written about, and the written word says the blessing runs toward the house that has you in it, and the Holy Spirit was the one who moved those three people to keep asking for two solid years.

Two years. Think about that on its own for a second. They have asked you a hundred times and you have said no a hundred times and they have not stopped. People stop. They did not.

That is not politeness. Nobody is polite for a hundred weeks. That is the Spirit of God keeping a door open with three ordinary people who probably could not tell you why they keep asking.

The room where nothing had to be arranged

There was a hall in Los Angeles in 1895 where a man named Phineas Bresee decided that no seat in the building could be rented, and the reason it is still spoken about is not the money. It is that the arrangement disappeared.

In a room with rented pews, everybody arrives having already worked something out. Where to sit, what it says, whether to walk further in or stop where they stop. All of it decided in advance, in the head, on the way there, every single week.

Bresee's hall had nothing to work out in it. You came in and you sat down. That is all there was.

And that is precisely what you have lost. You have not lost the meal. You have lost the Sunday where nothing has to be arranged, because your whole week now has a small engineering project running quietly in the back of it.

You have a seat at that table that was never conditional. His word puts you on the guest list by name, and the Holy Spirit has not been waiting for you to become the kind of person who can return an invitation.

The reason you have never said it

I want to be gentle here, because your instinct in all this has been a good one and I am not going to call it pride and leave you there.

You have been protecting them, and the written word has never once asked a guest to protect a host. That is genuinely what you have been doing, and the Holy Spirit has been standing in that doorway with you every week while you did it. You have imagined the moment where you say the true thing, and you have watched their faces do something in your imagination, and you have decided every single week that the sentence would cost them more than it costs you to invent another Tuesday.

But look at what the imagining has actually produced. Two years of them wondering. Two years of a woman they love saying no with a slightly different face each time. And the honest truth is they have their own theory by now, and their theory is almost certainly worse than the fact.

You do not owe anybody an explanation. That stands. But there is a difference between not owing a thing and hiding a thing, and one of them is freedom and the other one is a job.

You are free at that table. That is what is written over the guest who cannot recompense, and the Spirit of God is not embarrassed by anything true you might say in a doorway.