Waiting At The Edge Of The Room

At every gathering of his life he has stood nearest the door.

He does not think of it as shyness, and it is not. He is good with people. He will talk to anybody. It is that some part of him has always positioned itself where leaving is easy and where nobody has to make room, and he has done it at weddings and funerals and in his own house at his own parties.

And he prays the same way.

He came out of a childhood where he was the extra one in several houses, and he learned early and well how to be no trouble, and being no trouble means standing where you can go. He was loved. That is the strange part. He was genuinely loved by people who would have been distressed to know how he stood.

So when he prays, he hovers. He is there, and he is engaged, and he is entirely by the door, and he has never once put his coat down.

If you stand at the edge, come and sit properly at this table. Nobody here is going to make a fuss about where you are.

The position was learned before it was chosen

Let us describe it as it happened, because a man will otherwise turn it into a character defect.

A child in somebody else's house works out how to be easy to have around. Standing near the door is one of the ways: it says I will not be in your way, and I can go the moment I am not wanted, and nothing about this arrangement will cost you anything.

That is intelligence in a small person, and it worked, and there is no shame in it anywhere.

The trouble is only that it stayed after the houses changed, and it came with him into a room where the terms are completely different.

You are not a guest. Nothing about where you learned to stand describes your position with God, and no arrangement of yours has ever set the terms of your belonging. I am not saying it to be warm. The written word says now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God (Ephesians 2:19), where household is the domestic word and not a legal one, and the Holy Spirit presses that home in a courtyard full of people.

The word Paul chose

Here is what changed this for me, and it is not an instruction to stand further in.

Look at how many times he says it in a single verse, because the repetition is doing something.

Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God.Ephesians 2:19

No more strangers. No more foreigners. Fellowcitizens. Household. Four terms in one sentence, and he keeps circling because he is trying to close off every possible way a reader could still place themselves near the door.

And the last one is the warmest and the most specific. Household is not a status, it is a place at a table in a family home, and it is the word he leaves the reader on.

You have been named into a household, and the Word spends four terms making sure nobody can read themselves out of it. That is written into the piling up of the sentence, and the Holy Spirit is what drives it home in a man who has always stood nearest the door.

Nobody is asking you to be loud

Something has to be said, because a man reading this will now consider making himself more present in rooms, and that is not the point and it will exhaust him.

Where you stand at a party is nobody's business. Some people prefer the edge and always will, and that is temperament rather than injury.

What is being said is only about the other room, the one where you pray, where a habit learned in somebody else's house has been quietly describing a position that is not yours.

You have a place at the table whether you are the loudest person there or the quietest, and the place was not assigned by your manner. Scripture says he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee (Hebrews 13:5), which settles the question of whether anybody could be asked to go, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been keeping that seat through every year a man stood by the door.

And if this has cost more than anybody at this table knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.