You Have Never Arrived As A Guest

There is a specific four seconds that happens after a door opens, and he has been on the wrong side of it for nine years.

He knows what it looks like when somebody arrives as a guest. He has watched it a thousand times from inside other people's houses. The door goes, and there is a noise in the hallway, and somebody says a name in a particular voice, and there is a small commotion, and a coat is taken, and somebody calls through to the kitchen, and the whole house rearranges itself very slightly around the fact that a person has come.

What happens when he arrives is different, and it is not unkind, and he wants that understood before anything else.

The door opens and there is a fractional straightening. Then he is brought in, and he is offered something, and everybody is warm and pleased he is there, and he sits in the chair that was cleared before he came, and there is a beat where the household waits to find out what kind of visit this is going to be.

Nobody has ever taken his coat off him in nine years. He tried to count once and could not find an instance.

He is not owed a coat. He knows that. It is not a complaint about a single person and if any of those families read this they would be horrified and would start doing it deliberately, which would be worse.

Here is what it actually is. He is a visitor, and a visitor is a category, and it is a good category and he has been in it a long time. A guest is a different category. A guest is somebody a house has been waiting for.

And he was at a wedding in the spring, a big one, and he was seated well and looked after all evening, and at about ten o'clock he found himself standing near the door watching an elderly man arrive late.

The commotion in that hallway lasted about a minute and a half. Four people came out. Somebody took his coat and somebody else took his hat and a woman put both hands on his shoulders and said his name twice.

He said he went outside for a bit of air.

He counted the water

Let me tell you what this message is before we go any further, and I will keep to it.

There is nothing at the end of this for you to do. No practice, no conversation, no request to make of anybody. If a single line of this turns into homework then it has failed. You are being given something and asked for nothing, and that holds all the way to the last word.

Now, there is a scene in Luke that is worth reading for something almost nobody notices in it.

Jesus is at dinner at the house of a man called Simon. A woman comes in and washes His feet with her tears. And Simon thinks something disapproving, and Jesus answers what he thought, and then says this.

I entered into thine house, thou gavest me no water for my feet: but she hath washed my feet with tears, and wiped them with the hairs of her head. Thou gavest me no kiss: but this woman since the time I came in hath not ceased to kiss my feet. My head with oil thou didst not anoint: but this woman hath anointed my feet with ointment.Luke 7:44-46

Read what He is doing there. He is counting.

Water for the feet, a kiss at the door, oil for the head. Those were the three ordinary courtesies you gave a guest in that world. Not lavish. Standard. The equivalent of taking somebody's coat.

And He had received none of the three, and He noticed, and He kept the account, and He said it out loud in the room.

So hear this, standing outside a wedding getting some air: He knows exactly what has not been given to you, and He was counting it before you were. That is not my sympathy; it is what His word records the Lord Himself doing about hospitality He did not receive, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes an ancient list of three courtesies and lays it on a man who has not had his coat taken in nine years.

And notice something else about that scene, because it is the part that will do you the most good.

He is not bitter. There is no grievance in His voice anywhere in that passage and He is not scolding Simon for the sake of it. He raises it in order to point at somebody else who did give Him those things, and the whole speech is actually a defense of a woman who is being looked down on.

But He does not pretend it did not happen. He does not say it was fine, or that He had not noticed, or that a person in His position should not expect the ordinary courtesies. He says plainly: no water, no kiss, no oil.

You are allowed to have noticed. Scripture has Christ Himself keeping that account out loud, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who has been telling you that a man who counts the coats is being petty.

And here is the thing to sit with. In that story the one who gave Him what the host had not given was a person nobody in the room considered qualified to give anything.

The welcome you have not been getting from the households you serve has been arriving from directions you would not have looked in. It is not organized and it does not look like a hallway with four people in it, and it has been happening: in the person who is odd and always says the right thing, in the one nobody listens to who noticed you were tired in June.

You have been received. Not in the shape you have been watching for, which is why you have not counted it, and His word puts the real reception in the hands of somebody the room had written off, and the Holy Spirit has been arranging that for nine years without a hallway.