The Way He Walked In

The folding chairs are stacked by the door and nobody has taken them back to the church yet.

It is ten past seven and his daughter's birthday is over. The last gold of the evening is coming in low across the counter and lighting up the side of a sheet cake with one corner cut out of it. There is a balloon on the floor that has gone soft and is riding an inch above the linoleum every time somebody walks past. Paper plates in the trash. The good scissors in the wrong drawer, which will be a whole conversation tomorrow.

His brother is drying and he is washing, and his daughter is sitting up on the counter where she is not supposed to sit, swinging her heels against the cabinet.

She asks about Grandpa. She was four when he died and she has about two real memories, and the rest is what people tell her.

So he does the impression. He has done it a hundred times and it never fails.

Two knocks on the doorframe, he says, even when the door was standing wide open. Even when it was his own house. Hands in his pockets. Then he said everybody's name, in the exact order he saw them, going around the room, and he never once got it wrong and he never once skipped anybody. And if the room was already loud he would just stand there with his hands in his pockets until it got quiet, and it always did.

His brother is laughing at the sink with a plate in his hand because it is exactly right. It is thirty seconds and their father is standing in the kitchen.

Then his daughter says, still swinging her heels: what are you like when you come in?

And he does not have an answer.

He turns the water off and he stands there with his hands in the sink, and what goes through him is not the question she asked. It is a bigger one that has been idling behind it for about eleven years.

He could give you a list. He is good at the list. He could tell you what he is trying to be less of, and he could put it in order, and he could tell you which item he is worst at. Eleven years of that list. He has prayed over the list. He has crossed things off it and written them back on.

But if somebody stopped him in the church parking lot and asked him plainly what he is being made into, the honest answer is that he does not know. He knows the direction he is walking away from. He could not describe the thing he is walking toward, or what it would look like coming through a door.

His brother hands him the towel. The balloon goes past the cabinet again.

Somewhere in your own house there is a version of that question, and it is possible nobody has ever asked it out loud.

Subtraction never once produced a face

Here is the thing about the list, and I say it as somebody who kept one for years.

The list is all subtraction. Less of this, fewer of those, not that again. And a man can work a subtraction list for a decade and get genuinely better at several items on it and still be unable to answer a nine year old on a kitchen counter, because subtraction does not produce a face. If you removed everything on your list tomorrow, you would have described an absence. Nobody has ever walked into a room as an absence.

That is not me scolding you for keeping a list. Keep it if it helps. It is me saying the list was never going to answer the question, and the frustration you feel is not a discipline problem, it is a category problem.

You are being made into somebody, not merely out of something, and the direction of that has been settled without your input. Romans 8:29 is written to say that God set out in advance to conform His people to the image of His Son, which is a portrait rather than an inventory, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that work in a kitchen at ten past seven on an ordinary evening.

Two verses that hand you a walk instead of a standard

Read what Paul actually puts in front of a man here, because it is not a standard and it is not a checklist.

Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children; And walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweetsmelling savour.Ephesians 5:1-2

Followers there is the word we get imitators from. And the picture underneath it is domestic and small: dear children, copying, the way children do, without instruction, mostly without noticing.

Then the content of the imitation lands, and it is one thing. Walk in love, the way Christ loved and gave Himself. Not walk in seventeen improvements. Walk in love. The likeness is a way of loving, worked out in giving, and everything anybody has ever put on a list is downstream of that or it is decoration.

You have a portrait in front of you and it is a person, not a standard. Those verses are written as a walk to be copied rather than a bar to be cleared, and it is the Spirit who makes an ancient sentence about imitation into something happening at your own sink.

Which is why I refuse to hand you Christlikeness as behavior management. The moment likeness becomes a set of behaviors, a man starts performing them, and performed love is the one thing on earth that everybody in a house can detect and nobody can name. Your children would know inside a week.

You were adopted before any of this started and the word for you in that verse is dear children. That is what is written there, plainly, as the ground the imitating stands on rather than a prize at the end of it, and the same Spirit that Scripture calls the Spirit of adoption is the one who put the word dear in front of children.

What a house learns without being taught

Nobody sat that man down and taught him his father's entrance. He was not given a curriculum on knocking twice on an open doorframe.

He got it by being in the room. Thirty years of being in the room. And that is how likeness travels, in a family and in the Kingdom both, which is why Ephesians uses children for the picture instead of students.

So here is what I want to say plainly, and I want it heard as ministry and not as a footnote. If what actually comes through your doorways is something the house is frightened of, or if the reason you cannot picture what you are becoming is that most days go by on holding on, put another person into this with you. Start at a doctor: a body running on empty turns out a man his own family does not recognize, and that is treatable. A counselor, because nobody can see the doorway they are standing in. A pastor who hears all of it, and not the version trimmed down for a birthday party. None of that stands in for God working; a great deal of the time it is how He works. And if the evenings have run somewhere past regret, if standing at this sink has turned into doing sums about whether the rooms would be easier with nobody coming through the door, then dial 988 before those chairs go back to the church, or the number for the crisis line nearest you, and keep somebody standing in the kitchen while you do it.

You are in the room where the likeness comes from, and that is not something you arranged. Scripture puts believers in Christ and Christ in them, and the Spirit is what makes that an address rather than a metaphor, so the proximity that forms a person is already the situation you are standing in.