Somebody Came To The Door

There were two seconds between the knock and the decision.

You know those two seconds. There is a knock, and before anything conscious happens you have already run a calculation, and the calculation is: what do I look like right now, and who is that likely to be, and is the overlap between those two things acceptable.

And if it is not, you stand very still in your own hallway until they go away.

Or you answer it, and the whole conversation happens with about a fifth of you occupied by the fact of your own face, and you cut it shorter than you meant to, and afterward you are tired in a way that a two minute conversation should not have made you.

I want to say something about this and I want to say it plainly, and I am going to be careful, because this is the last article on this site and there is a way to get it wrong.

I am not going to tell you to stop wearing makeup.

That would be an enormous mistake and it would undo everything the last six articles have been doing. It would take one more thing off you and put a new rule in its place, and a rule is a correction, and correction is what we have spent this whole site getting out from under. If you like it, wear it. It is not a moral question and it never was.

The subject is not what is on your face. It is the list.

Because there is a list. You have never written it down, but you could tell me who is on it. The people who are allowed to see you as you are. And it is shorter than it was ten years ago, and there are people who have quietly come off it, and you did not decide that either.

That is the thing worth looking at. Not the makeup. The shrinking.

Their faces were not ashamed

There is a line in Psalm 34 that mentions faces specifically, and it is doing something more precise than a general encouragement.

They looked unto him, and were lightened: and their faces were not ashamed. (Psalm 34:5, King James Version)

Their faces were not ashamed.

Notice the direction of it. They looked unto him. Not at themselves, not at each other, not at a reflection. The looking goes outward and lands on God, and the result comes back and shows up on the face.

Which is a very different mechanism from the one that has been running here.

You are looking at something outside yourself in order to be unashamed, and shame has never once been argued out of a face by examining it harder. Psalm 34:5 says they looked unto him and were lightened, which puts the looking outward, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns a woman's eyes off her own face and onto God.

The attempt has been to arrive at an unashamed face by working on the face. That is looking inward at the problem and staying there, and it does not resolve, because a face examined for long enough always produces something.

The verse describes the opposite motion. The face is not the object being fixed. It is where something arrives from somewhere else.

You are somewhere light arrives rather than somewhere repairs get made, and a face has never once been the object in that sentence. Psalm 34 says they looked unto him, and were lightened, and the Spirit of God is what turns a woman's face into a place something lands.

And there is one more thing in that sentence, and it is the word ashamed rather than the word beautiful.

Shame is not about how a thing looks. Shame is about being seen. A person can be ashamed of something nobody would think twice about, and entirely unbothered by something objectively worse, and the difference is not the thing itself. It is whether being seen with it feels survivable.

That is why the two seconds at the door are so expensive. It was never a question about appearance. It was a question about exposure.

You are paying two seconds for exposure rather than for a face, and no appearance has ever once been the thing that made a doorway hard. Psalm 34:5 sends the looking outward and lets the face be where the light lands, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns attention away from a reflection.

You are dealing with being seen rather than with how you look, and shame has never once been a report on a face. Psalm 34:5 sends the looking outward and lets the face be where the light lands, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns a person's attention away from her own reflection.

The list gets shorter on its own

Here is the part I actually want you to have, and it is the reason this row closes the site.

Nobody decides to shrink the list. It shrinks by attrition.

There was a day when nothing had been done and somebody came, and it was uncomfortable, and so the next time there was slightly more care taken with that person. And then a bit more. And after a few years that person is somebody who gets prepared for, and nobody could name the day it changed.

Multiply that by a decade and the list is down to two or three people, and there are relationships in your life that now have a small permanent cost attached to them that nobody else knows about.

You are paying a cost inside your own friendships, and nobody on the other end of them has ever once known it was being charged. Psalm 34 says they looked unto him, and were lightened: and their faces were not ashamed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a toll off a doorway.

That cost is the real thing this article is about. Not vanity. The quiet expense of being at slight readiness around people you love.

And it compounds, because a person you have to get ready for is a person you see less. You put things off. You suggest later instead of now. And none of that ever presents itself as being about a face. It presents itself as being busy.

You are able to stop paying a small toll on the people you love, and that shortening list has never once been something you decided. The written word puts the face where light arrives rather than where work is done, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a person be seen without it costing her anything.

Answer it once

So here is the assignment, and it is the last one on this site.

Answer the door once this week exactly as you happen to be.

Once. Not a policy. Not a decision about how to live. One door, one time, in whatever state a knock happens to find you. Then afterward, ten warm minutes of care for your own hands, which has nothing to do with the door.

And do not explain anything. This is the whole discipline. Do not open with sorry about the state of me, do not mention not expecting anybody, do not gesture at your own face.

You are able to open a door and say nothing at all about your own face, and an apology has never once been owed to anybody standing on a step. Psalm 34 says their faces were not ashamed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds a woman's mouth shut on the sorry.

Because the apology is the thing that does the damage, far more than the face does. The apology tells the person at the door that they have been shown something below standard, and it teaches you, again, that being seen requires a defense.

Say hello, and then give them whatever care you would have given them anyway.

They will not notice. That is not encouragement, it is a plain fact. People are extremely occupied with themselves and are almost never studying anybody.

You are able to be unstudied at your own front door, and nobody standing on a step has ever once been conducting an examination. The written word puts unashamed faces on people who had looked outward, and the Spirit of God is the one who is in that hallway after a knock.

You are able to be seen without offering an explanation for it, and the apology has never once been what anybody at the door required. Psalm 34:5 records faces that were not ashamed after the looking went outward, and the Holy Spirit is the one standing in the hallway with you in the two seconds after a knock.