The Door I Drew Myself

She would tell you there is no door.

She would mean it, too. Ask her whether anybody is welcome and she will say yes without hesitating, and she would be genuinely upset to be told otherwise, and every visible thing about how she runs that room backs her up.

The doors are open. There is no form. Nobody is asked anything at the entrance.

And there is a door, and she drew it herself, and it is about four feet inside the actual one.

You can see it if you watch her for a month. Somebody new comes in and she is warm to everybody, and she is warm to this one too, but there is a second thing that happens in her about ninety seconds later, and it is a question she is not aware of asking.

Are you the real thing?

It is not about behavior. She is not a snob about how people look or speak and she would fight you over that. It is subtler and it is worse. She is checking for a set of signals she cannot list, and if they come, she opens all the way. And if they do not, she stays warm and something behind her eyes files them under visitor.

Fourteen years of running a room with no door in it, and a door in it.

So let me ask you, and answer honestly, because nobody else can hear.

What is the entry requirement you have never said out loud?

He listed the three hardest ones and did not soften any of them

Paul writes a sentence to Galatia that people quote so often it has gone smooth, and I want to rough it up again by putting it back where it was said.

That world had three divisions that everybody treated as simply how things are. Not prejudices anybody argued about. Structure. The way a floor is a floor.

Nation. Status. Sex.

And Paul takes all three, in one sentence, and does not qualify a single one of them.

There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.Galatians 3:28

You are inside that sentence and not adjacent to it, and the Spirit who sealed you into Christ did not consult the room about it, which means the oneness is a thing that was done rather than a thing anybody grew into.

Read what he does not do. He does not say these things should matter less. He does not say we ought to try to see past them. He says there is neither, which is a claim about what is actually the case, made about the three most load-bearing divisions his hearers had.

And notice where the weight sits: for you are all one in Christ Jesus. The reason is not our attitude. The reason is a location. You are all in one place, so there is no room in the place for the sorting.

Now let me say the thing to you directly, and gently, because I do not think you are a hypocrite and I am not going to treat you as one.

Your open doors are real. The warmth is real. Fourteen years of it are real and a great many people have been fed in that room.

What has happened is that a checking reflex has grown up behind the welcome, and because you never installed it deliberately you have never once inspected it.

The word says you are all one in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit did that sealing, and there is nowhere in that sentence for a second door four feet inside the first one.

You did not build it. You drew it. And a thing you drew can be rubbed out.