I Avoid The Window That Looks At It

There is a window at the back of your house that you do not stand at.

You have not put it like that to yourself. What has actually happened is that you make the tea at the other end of the counter now. You take the chair with its back to it. When you talk on the phone you walk the other way down the hall.

Small adjustments, made one at a time, none of them noticed at the time, and the sum of them is a man who has rerouted his own house.

And the reason is what is out there.

Two summers of it, and now it does not look like a garden that needs work. It looks like a garden that has gone, and there is a difference, and the difference is visible from that window in about a second and a half.

You are not hiding from anybody who is looking for you angrily, and a man avoiding a window has never once been a man nobody came out for.

Let me say what I think the avoiding is actually about, because it is not the weeds.

It is that looking out there produces a sentence about you. Not about the yard. About what kind of man lets that happen, and how long it has been, and what that says.

And you have found that if you do not stand at the window, the sentence does not get said. Which is true, and it works, and it costs you the back half of your own house.

Where art thou

There is a moment in Genesis that is the first hiding in the Bible, and it happens in a garden, and the thing that comes next is not what people expect.

And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself. (Genesis 3:9 and 10, King James Version)

Where art thou.

Now, God is not short of information. That is not a question asked to find something out. It is a question asked to bring somebody out, which is a different kind of question entirely.

You are being called rather than searched for, and a question like that has never once been asked by somebody who needed the answer. Genesis 3:9 has God asking a man where he is while knowing exactly where he is, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an old question sound like an invitation instead of a summons.

And notice where God is when He asks it.

He came into the garden. He did not stand outside it and shout. The whole scene has God walking in the place at the cool of the day, into the exact ground where the thing went wrong, looking for the man who is in the bushes.

You are not being called from a safe distance, and God has never once required a man to come out to Him before He would come in. The Holy Spirit is the one who comes into the ground a man is avoiding, and the written word puts God walking in the garden rather than waiting at the gate.

And here is Adam's answer, which is the most honest sentence in the chapter. I was afraid, and I hid myself.

Not I was busy. Not I lost track of the time. I was afraid. And nowhere in the following verses does God tell him that the fear was ridiculous or that he should have known better.

You were never going to be mocked for the hiding, and a man who says plainly that he was afraid has never once been laughed at in that passage. The Spirit of God is the one who receives an honest answer without turning it into evidence, and the word records the fear and the hiding without one word of contempt.

The window is doing more work than the garden

Let me be practical about the arithmetic of avoidance, because it has been running a while and the cost has never been totaled.

The garden is out there whether you look at it or not.

Not looking has not changed one thing about the state of it. What not looking has changed is the size of it in your head, because a thing you never see is maintained entirely by imagination, and imagination is not a careful estimator.

I would put money on this: it is worse in the head than it is in the yard. Not because it is fine out there. Because two years of unchecked imagining always overshoots.

You are carrying a version of that garden that nobody has measured, and a thing kept out of sight has never once stayed the size it actually was. The Holy Spirit is the one who brings a man's estimate back to the ground, and Genesis 3:9 calls a man out into the open rather than leaving him with his own account of things.

And there is the second cost, which is the one that actually matters.

You have lost a window. And a chair. And the end of a counter, and one direction down your own hall. Those are real things, and you use them every day, and they have quietly gone out of service to keep one sentence from being said.

You are paying rent on the back half of your own house, and avoiding a view has never once been free for anybody. The Spirit of God is the one who gives a man his own rooms back, and the written word has God walking into the very place a man had decided he could not be seen.

Stand there for one minute

So here is the assignment, and it is deliberately not about the garden.

Stand at that window for one minute and look at the whole of it.

Not to plan. Not to make a list of what needs doing. Do not take a notepad and do not start working out where you would begin.

Just look at it, the way you would look at somebody else's yard.

You are able to look at a thing without immediately being asked what you are going to do about it, and one minute at a window has never once obliged a man to produce a plan. Genesis 3:9 calls a man out into the open without a task attached, and the Holy Spirit is the one standing at that glass with you.

I want to say what will probably happen, because knowing it beforehand takes some of the sting out.

For the first fifteen seconds it will be unpleasant, and the sentence will arrive, the one about what kind of man. Let it arrive. Do not argue with it and do not agree with it. Just let it be said and keep looking.

And then, somewhere in the second half of that minute, something quite ordinary tends to happen. It stops being a verdict and starts being a yard. There is a fence. There is a thing growing that you did not plant. The light is doing something at one end of it.

You are able to stand in front of a thing until it goes back to being ordinary, and sixty seconds has never once been too long for a man to hold something. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present in the second half of that minute, and the word has God coming into the garden at the cool of the day, which is a time of day and not an emergency.

Then walk away. Do nothing else today.