I Keep Trying To Make It Look Like Theirs

You straightened a cushion on Tuesday night and nobody was coming.

That is the whole article, really, and I could stop there. But I want to stay with it a moment, because it is such a small action that it does not look like anything, and it is the most revealing thing you did all week.

Nobody was coming. Nobody had been. It was half past nine on an ordinary evening in your own house with the curtains shut, and your hand went out and squared the cushion up as you walked past.

For whom?

There is an answer to that and you have never articulated it, because it has never been put to you as a question. There is an audience in that room. Not a real one. An assembled one, made out of a house you visited once where everything went together, and a photograph of a room that stayed with you, and possibly one particular person whose home always looks a certain way and who has never once commented on yours.

That audience is in the room every evening. It does not have a face and it never speaks and it never leaves, and you have been keeping your house at a standard for it for years.

And I want to say something before we go a step further, because this is the last article on this site and I do not want to end it with a rebuke.

There is nothing wrong with wanting a room to look nice.

Nothing. It is not vanity, it is not worldliness, it is not a failure to have your priorities in order. Human beings have arranged their spaces for as long as there have been spaces, and taking pleasure in a room is a good thing, and I am not about to take it off you in the final piece of writing on this site.

The problem is not that you care how the room looks.

The problem is that there is an inspection happening, and it never finishes, and you are the only one attending it.

Martha, Martha

There is a scene in Luke where a woman is preparing a house for a visitor, and the sentence Jesus says to her is gentler than it usually gets preached.

And Jesus answered and said unto her, Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: (Luke 10:41, King James Version)

Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things.

Hear how that is said. The name twice. Nobody says a name twice to tell somebody off. You say a name twice to somebody who is going too fast to hear you the first time, and you say it to get their attention gently, and it is the tone you would use with a person you were fond of who was working themselves into the ground.

And then look at the actual charge, because it is precise.

Careful and troubled about many things. Not wrong. Not worldly. Not failing spiritually. Troubled, which is a description of what is happening inside her, and about many things, which is a description of the number of them.

She is not being told that preparing a house is bad. Somebody had to make that meal and He does not suggest otherwise anywhere in that passage. She is being told what it is doing to her.

That is the diagnosis you have been waiting for, and it is not about your house at all.

The cushions are not the issue. The issue is that there are many things, and they are always there, and there is no evening when they are all done, because the standard is set by an audience that is not in the room and cannot be satisfied and cannot ever say that is enough now, sit down.

What is being named here is what it is doing to you, and it has never once been a charge against wanting a room to look well. Luke 10:41 says careful and troubled about many things rather than wrong about any of them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says a name twice to somebody moving too fast to hear it.

An audience that never arrives cannot be satisfied

Here is the mechanical problem, and it is worth seeing plainly, because it explains why effort has never fixed this.

A real visitor arrives, sees the house, and the evaluation ends. Whatever they thought, they thought it, and then they had tea and talked about something else and went home. That is a closed loop. It finishes.

Your audience never arrives. Which means the evaluation never happens, which means it never concludes, which means it runs continuously, at low volume, in every room, forever.

You cannot pass an inspection that is never conducted. There is no possible arrangement of your front room that produces the sentence: right, that is done now. The only thing available is the maintaining, and the maintaining is what you have been doing every evening at half past nine.

And this is where it costs something real, and it is not tiredness.

A house kept for an audience is a house you are slightly performing in. You are the only one there and you are still on. And a person who is on in their own home does not fully rest in it, and that is a strange and expensive thing to be true of the place you sleep.

An inspection that never concludes has never once been passable, and there was never an arrangement of that room that would end it. The written word names the trouble as the many things rather than as any one of them, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a person be off duty in her own house.

Leave one thing out

So here is the assignment, and it is the last one on this site.

Leave one thing out tonight that you would normally put away before anybody saw it.

One thing. A jigsaw half finished on the floor. The mug on the table. The blanket where somebody left it. A book face down and open at the page.

And leave it there overnight. Go to bed with it out. That is the whole exercise.

Do not tidy it as you leave the room, which is the moment it will happen, on the way to the light switch, without a decision. You will have to catch your own hand.

And notice which particular thing you chose, because that is worth something. The thing you can most easily leave out is not the thing this is about. If it was easy, pick something slightly harder tomorrow.

What you are doing is very small and very specific. You are letting the room be a room that people live in for one night, with the evidence of the living still visible in it, which is what every room looks like in every house where anybody is actually happy.

It is possible to leave the evidence of a life in view, and the room has never once been an exhibit awaiting anybody. Luke 10:41 addresses the trouble in the person rather than the state of the house, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman walking past a mug on the way to bed.