That Door Became The Enemy

It is a door. Four feet of wood with a handle on it.

And you cannot walk past it without something happening in your chest, and it has been like that for about eight months, and you have never said it out loud because saying it makes you sound like a person at war with a piece of furniture.

But it is real. There is a physical thing that occurs between the top of the stairs and that door, and by the time you reach it you are already braced, and by the time you knock, whatever you were going to say has changed shape.

And here is what worries you most, and it is right to worry about it. He can hear it. Not the thought. The tone. Sixteen year olds are extremely good at tone, and what arrives on his side of that door is not a mother asking, it is a mother who has come a long way to get there.

I want to work on the landing rather than on the boy, because the landing is where this is being decided.

The Lord looketh on the heart

There is a sentence in Samuel that is usually quoted about other people and is much more useful pointed at what is in front of you.

But the LORD said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature; because I have refused him: for the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart. (1 Samuel 16:7, King James Version)

Man looketh on the outward appearance.

Read it as a description rather than a rebuke. It is not saying people are shallow. It is saying that what is visible is what gets processed, and that the visible thing is reliably not the whole matter.

You are looking at the outward thing, and it was never dishonest to be a person who sees what is in front of them. 1 Samuel 16:7 states the human way of seeing plainly and without contempt for anybody, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as an offer of a second look.

And notice what Samuel was actually looking at. A tall, impressive man who seemed obviously right. The visible thing was not ugly. It was compelling, and it was still not the matter.

You have a visible thing that is compelling and not the matter, and it was never the door that this was about. The written word separates what a person sees from what is actually there, and the Spirit of God is what gets a mother's eyes off four feet of wood.

What the door has come to stand for

Now let me name what has happened, because it is not that you hate a door.

The door has become the place where a year of refusals is stored.

Every no he has said is in it. Every time you went up hopeful and came down flat is in it. It has been collecting since about February, and it is now not a door, it is a summary, and a summary of a year is what gets walked toward every time anybody goes up those stairs.

You are not carrying a temper up your own landing, and it was never dislike that made those stairs difficult. 1 Samuel 16:7 sets the visible thing apart from what is actually there, and the Spirit of God is the one who shows a woman what has been stored in four feet of wood.

That is why the tone arrives before the person does. Nothing there is a reaction to him. It is a reaction to an accumulation, and he is standing behind it, and he receives all of it.

A door is not a person, and what rises on the landing is not a report on the boy behind it.

You are not angry at your son, and it was never him that you have been braced against on that landing. 1 Samuel 16 separates the outward from the actual in one sentence, which is exactly why the Spirit of God works on what a mother is looking at rather than on what a boy is doing.

And there is something worth saying about him, too. He does not know any of this. He has a year of his own in that room, and he is not standing behind the door counting refusals, because from where he sits he has simply been saying no to some walks.

Walk past it once

So the practical part, and it happens before any asking does.

Walk past the door once, today, with nothing to say to him.

You are able to go up those stairs without going to war, and it has never once required a reason to walk down your own landing. The passage moves the looking from the outward thing to the actual one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman at the top of her own stairs.

Go up for something else. Put something in the airing cupboard. Walk past it, down to the end, and come back, and do not knock.

The point is to have the physical experience of that landing without the year attached to it, because at the moment the two are welded together and they can be separated by about four repetitions.

And then, on a different day, knock, and ask small: I am going out for twenty minutes at six, come if you want. Let the no stand and go anyway.

You are able to unwrap the landing from the year, and it has never once required your son to change anything for that to happen. 1 Samuel 16:7 puts the seeing rather than the subject at the center, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present with a woman walking past a door and not knocking.