Both Feet Outside the Meeting Room

For the person who has waited outside a door so long that standing there has stopped feeling like a decision.

There's a scene in the gospels where a crowd of people bring a paralyzed man to a house and cannot get in. The door is blocked, the room is full, and there is no reasonable way through. So they go up onto the roof and take it apart.

What is easy to miss is how little fuss the account makes about the people in the doorway. Nobody is denounced. No case is brought against the crowd at the door for being in the way. The story simply moves, because the men carrying the stretcher were more interested in getting their friend to Jesus than in winning an argument about access.

Now look at your own corridor. The frosted glass door at the end of it stands open most evenings after six, and you have never once gone through it, and you could not tell anybody when you decided that.

Somebody drew a line you have been honoring for years, and the line was never drawn by God. Scripture says He sets an open door before His people that no one can shut, while the Holy Spirit is at work on the far side of a doorway you have never crossed.

How the Line Got Drawn

Be exact about this, because a vague sense of exclusion is much harder to answer than a specific one.

Nobody ever said it. That's the part that has kept it in place. There was no meeting where somebody explained that this room was for one sort of person and not another. If there had been, you'd have known what you were dealing with, and it would have lost most of its power.

What happened instead was smaller. A conversation stopped when you came in. A decision you'd have had a view on got made without you and mentioned afterward. A list went round and your name wasn't on it, and nobody was unkind about it, because nobody had thought about it at all.

Six or seven of those, over about a year, and a boundary exists. It has the solidity of something announced without ever having been announced, which makes it far harder to answer than a rule would be. A rule can be read. A rule has an author you could go and find.

You are obeying a boundary assembled out of small moments, and it has never once been tested. The written Word says what God opens no one shuts, while the Holy Spirit gives a clarity that a stopped conversation in a corridor never could.

That matters, because you cannot argue with an absence. You can only test one, and testing it looks like walking through a door rather than making a case.

The Case You Could Build in Four Minutes

You could assemble it standing there, and it is not what this is.

It would name the people inside that room. It would build the case, which you could build in about four minutes, because you've been standing in that corridor a long time and you've seen who gets asked and who doesn't. It would leave you heavier than it found you, with a list and a grievance and nothing changed.

That version helps nobody. It also tends to be inaccurate, because most exclusion is made of thoughtlessness rather than intent, and thoughtlessness doesn't hold up well as a charge.

You can be released from a boundary without prosecuting the people who wandered into drawing it. Scripture sets your standing on what God has opened rather than on what anybody owes you, while the Holy Spirit takes weight off a person instead of handing them more.

Nothing here requires you to confront anybody, demand a seat, or make an announcement. The corridor should get lighter, not heavier, and nothing in that depends on somebody else moving first.

What Standing Outside Has Bought

The corridor purchases something real, and it deserves an honest accounting.

Out here, nothing is ever refused. You are not told no, because you have never asked. Your sense of where you stand is entirely under your own management, and no meeting can ever disappoint you, which is genuinely worth something and is exactly why you've stayed.

Here's the other column. Four years of decisions have been made by people who did not have the one piece of information you had. That isn't a complaint about them. It's arithmetic, and it lands on the work rather than on anybody's feelings.

It is worth naming the piece of information, because vagueness makes it easier to keep quiet about. You know which of the two proposals actually gets used on the ground, because you are the one who has watched both of them meet a Tuesday.

Nobody in that room has watched a Tuesday. That is not a failing on their part, it is where they sit. A decision made without the person who has watched a Tuesday is not a worse decision because the people are worse. It is a worse decision because a fact is missing, and the fact is standing in a corridor.

You are paying for the safety of that corridor with the quality of what happens in the room. The written Word gives you a place that no one can shut, while the Holy Spirit steadies a person walking into a room rather than waiting outside it with them.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Tahoma This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.