Saying It Over My Own Doorway

She has been in it since March and the hall still has three boxes in it.

She bought it on her own, which was a whole thing in itself and took eleven months and two failed offers, and she is proud of it in a way she does not put into words in front of people.

The neighbors are pleasant. The kitchen needs doing eventually.

And there is a thing she has been doing since about the second week that she only identified in June.

She has been waiting.

Not for anything she could name if you asked her directly, and certainly not for a person, and she is not lonely in the way people mean when they say that word. But somewhere underneath, in the part that does not use sentences, she has been waiting for somebody to come.

Somebody from somewhere, whose job it is, who would stand in the hall and say something over the house.

She knows how that sounds. She is thirty eight and has a mortgage and a good job and she does not believe in anything that would require a man in a collar to be a functional necessity.

But her grandmother's house had a thing on the doorframe, and there was a story about the day they moved in that got told at every Christmas, and there was a sense, in that house, that words had been said over it at the beginning.

Her house has had nothing said over it. She has an alarm and a survey and a fifteen year fixed rate, and no sentence.

Into whatsoever house ye enter, first say

Stand in the hall with the boxes and let me show you the sentence, because it is short and He gives it as an instruction and it is the first thing He tells them to do.

He is sending out seventy people. There are a great many instructions in that passage about purses and shoes and not greeting people on the road, and then there is this.

And into whatsoever house ye enter, first say, Peace be to this house.Luke 10:5

First say.

Before the conversation, before the meal, before whatever they were there to do. The first act inside a doorway is a sentence spoken over the building and the people in it.

And notice how small it is. Peace be to this house. Five words. There is no ritual described, no equipment, no qualification named for the person saying it, and nothing whatever in the passage about who is allowed to.

Hear this in your own hall. You are not waiting for a functionary, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture hands the sentence to seventy ordinary people going into houses, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it more than a nicety, and He has been in that house since the day you got the keys.

Now let me be honest about the waiting, because you named it in June and that was brave and it deserves a proper answer rather than a reassurance.

You were not being superstitious. Something real is missing, you identified it correctly, the written word names it in one line, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it would not leave you alone.

Houses have always been blessed. Doorframes have been marked, and words have been said at thresholds, in almost every culture there has ever been, because a threshold is a real thing and moving into a place is a real event and human beings have always known that something ought to be said.

What has happened is not that the practice was wrong. It is that in one or two generations we stopped doing it and kept the survey.

Hear this too, and let it stop the underneath part. You are not short of anything you cannot get, and Scripture is what says so. What is written puts the sentence in the mouth of whoever walks through the door, and the Spirit of God has never once required a particular office before those five words would carry, and you have been standing in the one doorway in the world that is yours.

And now the thing about the grandmother's house, because it is the whole reason this has been sitting in you since March.

What she had was not the doorframe. It was the story: a day, an event, words said at a beginning, and forty years of telling it at Christmas until the house had a start rather than a completion date.

Your house has a completion date. It does not yet have a beginning.

That is entirely fixable, tonight, in about eleven seconds, by the person standing in the hall.