The Room We Do Not Use

"Hall, stairs, landing, both bedrooms, and the bathroom ceiling," the homeowner says, walking ahead of them with the mug of tea she has forgotten she is holding. "And that one," she says, not stopping, not pointing, "we don't use. Don't worry about that one."

Three of them on the job. Radio already on. Dust sheets going down in the hall like a tide coming in. His apprentice is looking at the shut door with the open curiosity of a nineteen year old, and the older man on the crew has already stopped looking, because in twenty years of other people's houses he has learned that every third house has a room like that, and it is never his business, and it is never nothing.

He does not look either. He does not need to. He knows exactly what a shut door in a house looks like from the inside, because there is one in him.

Not a room in his house. A room in his life. One place he has never once brought into the light and does not intend to. He prays. He has prayed for years, honestly, about nearly everything. Money, his marriage, his daughter, his temper, the job. He has brought God through every room in the house, and every time the walk gets to that door he says, in effect, what she said on the stairs. We don't use that one. Don't worry about that one. And he moves on to the landing.

Oye. Hear me before we go any further, because on this site there are two readers and I am only speaking to one of you now. If the thing behind your door is something you did or chose, this is written to you. If what is behind your door was done to you, by someone else, that is not the same room and it is not the same door, and it is never spoken of on this site as though it were, and there is another article here written for you with more care than this one. Nothing about that room was ever yours to confess. I will not talk to you as if it were.

So, brother, sister, the door. You have a room you keep for yourself. You have kept it long enough that keeping it feels like a form of respect for God, as though He would rather not know. And you are quietly certain that if you opened it, He would do the thing everyone else would do, which is take one look and step back.

He was in the room before you shut it

Let me name what you carry, without opening a thing, because I am not going to ask you to describe one detail of it and neither is anyone here.

It is the weight of a door you have to walk past every time you pray. It is the strange tiredness of a life that is mostly honest with God and has one place that is not, and the way that one place makes the honesty everywhere else feel slightly like a performance. It is the certainty, older than any sermon, that there is a version of being known that you would not survive. And under it, the quietest thing, the assumption that God is like the people you might imagine telling. That He would recoil.

Now hear what Scripture says about the door.

And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.Hebrews 4:13

Read that slowly and let it do the strange thing it does. Nothing hidden. Not the room. He is not on the landing waiting to be let in. He is in the room. He has been in the room the whole time you have been telling Him not to worry about it, and He has seen every square inch of it, and here is the part that undoes the fear: He is still here. The One who sees the whole house has not left the house.

You are fully seen, right now, in the room you have never opened, and you are not abandoned in it. I did not make that up to comfort you; it is written, and the writer of Hebrews puts it three verses before the throne of grace, on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line about being seen and turns it from a threat into a relief inside a person.

Because look at what comes next. The same chapter, three verses later: let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace (Hebrews 4:16). Then. Because nothing is hidden, therefore, draw near. The whole argument is that being completely seen is the reason to come close, not the reason to keep the door shut. He is not asking you to open the room so that He can find out what is in it. He knows. He is asking you to open it so that you can stop walking past a door that He is already on the other side of.

You have a written reason to come closer rather than a reason to stay out in the hallway. Hebrews 4:16 puts the drawing near immediately after the nothing-hidden, and the Holy Spirit turns that order into a step a person actually takes.

He did not recoil

Go back to the first shut door in the Bible, because it is the same door.

The man hides in the garden. God comes walking in the cool of the day, and He already knows exactly what has happened and exactly where the man is standing, and He says, Where are you? (Genesis 3:9). It is not a question for information. It is an invitation to answer. God, who could have walked straight up to the tree, calls out first, so that the hiding man can come out on his own feet.

That is His character with a shut room. He does not kick the door in. He does not stand outside it and describe what is inside to make you flinch. He speaks, so that you can open it yourself, and when you do, He is not looking for a reason to leave. You have a God who came walking toward the hiding place, not away from it, and Scripture shows Him doing that on the first page shame ever appears, and the Spirit is the one who does the same walking toward you now, in this hallway.

And He did not recoil. Not from Adam. Not from David after the worst thing David did. Not from Peter by the charcoal fire. Scripture is a long record of God walking into rooms people were sure He would step back from, and staying. You are held by One who has looked at everything in the room and stayed in it, and that is not sentiment, it is the whole plot of the book, and His Spirit is the one who makes it personal in you.

Now hear the guardrail, because it is love. If you cannot open the door yet, you are not refusing God. He is not standing there with folded arms. He is in the room and He is patient, and a person who cannot say the sentence today has not lost anything, because the seeing was never conditional on the saying. When you can, you will. Nobody here is timing you.

Something belongs here in the middle where nobody can skip past it. If the shut room has gotten heavier as the years have gone, if the nights have been getting long, or if the thinking has traveled out past regret and toward wishing to be gone, get a person alongside you. Call your doctor. Sit down with a counselor. And you do not have to say one word about what is in that room to do it: a good one will never ask, and a person can be well helped for years without ever naming it. If tonight is a dark one, call or text 988 or a crisis line and let another human being be in it with you. That is not a soft spot in anybody's faith. God has always worked through people.