I Only See My House When Somebody Is Coming

At four o'clock you cannot see your kitchen at all.

At five past five, with somebody due at half past, you can see all of it. The mark on the wall by the light switch. The handle that has been loose since February. The cupboard that hangs a quarter inch lower than the one beside it. The strip of trim by the floor.

Nothing changed in that room in seventy minutes. Only the eyes changed.

And then, because there is not enough time to fix any of it, you clean instead. You wipe surfaces that were already clean. You move the pile. You put the candle out. You do forty minutes of work that will be invisible by tomorrow, on the things that can be moved, because the things that are actually wrong cannot be moved in twenty five minutes.

Then the door goes, and it is lovely, and everybody has a good evening, and at eleven o'clock the kitchen goes back to being invisible.

Before anything else, let me say the thing that matters most. This is not a character flaw and it is not vanity. It is a completely ordinary trick of human attention, and it has been costing you something without ever once being your fault.

Cumbered about much serving

There is a woman in Luke who is doing exactly this, and the thing Jesus says to her is far kinder than the way it usually gets quoted.

But Martha was cumbered about much serving, and came to him, and said, Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? (Luke 10:40, King James Version)

Cumbered is a wonderful old word. It means loaded down, weighed, dragged about by. Martha is not doing something wicked. She is doing something good, and she is doing far too much of it, and the doing has begun to drive her instead of the other way round.

And notice what she is actually upset about by the end of that verse. It is not the meal. It is that she is alone in it, and that nobody seems to have noticed how much of it there is.

You have been carrying a load that nobody in the house has ever counted, and being cumbered has never once meant that you are doing life wrong. Luke 10:40 puts that word on a good woman in the middle of a good work, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person set a load down without hearing it as an accusation.

Jesus does not tell Martha that the serving was bad. He tells her she is careful and troubled about many things, and that one thing is needful. That is a sentence about narrowing, not a sentence about failing.

You are allowed to narrow this all the way down to one thing, and choosing one thing has never once been laziness in the eyes of God. The Spirit of God is the one who takes a woman's shoulders down out of her ears, and it is written in Luke that the answer to too many things was never more effort.

Why the eyes work at five and not at four

Here is what is actually happening, because it is worth understanding rather than just feeling bad about.

Your brain runs a filter on everything you see all day long, and the filter is doing you a favor. If you consciously processed every object in your own kitchen every time you walked into it, you would be exhausted by nine in the morning. So it stops sending you the things that have not changed.

The loose handle stopped changing eight months ago. So it stopped arriving.

You have not stopped caring about that handle, your eyes have simply stopped delivering it, and a filter doing its job has never once been a fault in the woman it protects. Scripture records the Lord telling Martha plainly what was true rather than leaving her to guess at it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can lift a filter for four minutes on a quiet afternoon.

Then the doorbell is going to ring, and your brain does something clever. It borrows somebody else's eyes. It runs the room as a stranger would run it, and the filter drops, and everything comes flooding in at once.

That is not a character defect. That is a well built brain doing precisely what it is for.

You have a mind that can already see this house clearly, and it has never once been broken, only busy. It is written in Luke that Martha's problem was many things and not bad things, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can hand a woman a visitor's eyes on an ordinary Tuesday when nobody is coming at all.

The cost is only this. The one hour when the filter drops is the one hour when there is no time to do anything. So the seeing and the doing never meet.

Now let me name the limit before we go on, because I am not going to leave it in a footer. Never a gas appliance, never the breaker panel, never mains wiring, never a wall holding the building up, never a roof. Call a licensed professional and pay them properly. That one is not yours and it is not mine, and knowing where the line sits is a skill in itself.

Borrow the eyes on a Tuesday

So here is the move, and it takes four minutes.

Walk into your kitchen at a time when nobody is coming, and walk in the way you would walk in at five to five. Not the cleaning version. The seeing version.

You are able to arrive in your own kitchen like a visitor, and one deliberate walk through a doorway has never once been too small a thing for God to be in. The Spirit of God is the one who turns an ordinary look into a beginning, and Luke 10:40 has the Lord meeting a woman exactly where the work was piling up on her.

Stand where a guest would stand. Look at the room from the doorway rather than from the middle, because you never stand in your own doorway and a visitor never stands anywhere else.

Then write down the first three things you see. Not the ones you know are there. The first three that arrive.

You are perfectly able to stand in your own doorway for four minutes with a pen, and borrowing a visitor's eyes on a quiet afternoon has never once been beyond anybody. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes an honest look land as relief instead of a list of charges, and Luke 10:40 shows the Lord narrowing a good woman's many things down to one on purpose.

And then the important instruction. Do not clean anything. Not one thing. Cleaning is the thing your hands want to do because cleaning is possible in the time available, and it is the exact reason the loose handle has survived eight months.

The list is not a list of chores. It is a list of the three things your own eyes gave you when you finally let them work on a day with no pressure attached.

You have been given eyes that work perfectly well and a Tuesday with nothing at stake, and a short honest list has never once been able to condemn the woman who wrote it. Scripture puts one needful thing in front of a person who was drowning in a good many, and the same Spirit who spoke that is standing in the doorway with you.