Nowhere To Put A Tree

You said it as a joke in November and then heard how it sounded.

Somebody asked whether you would be putting a tree up and you laughed and said there is nowhere to put one, which was funny for about half a second and then was not, because it is simply true. There is nowhere in this house to stand a tree.

And it is not only the tree. There is nowhere to put a camp bed if somebody stays. There is nowhere for two children to build anything on the floor. There is nowhere to put down a box of photographs and go through it with your mother.

Not because the house is small. Because every clear surface and every clear square of floor has something of yours on it.

I am not going to tell you to rent a unit or reorganize, because that is advice and there is none of it here. I am going to talk about a sentence in Luke that has four words in it everybody knows.

There was no room

There is a line in Luke that is so familiar people stop hearing it, and the last clause of it is about space.

It is the most ordinary possible sentence about an extraordinary event, and the reason given is logistical.

And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn. (Luke 2:7, King James Version)

You are living in a house where room matters, and space has never once been a trivial thing in Scripture. Luke 2:7 records the absence of room as the reason for everything that follows in that stable, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that into a living room where crates are being shifted out of a corner.

Notice that Scripture bothers to say it. It could have left the reason out entirely. It tells us there was no room, and that detail has been in the story for two thousand years.

God is not indifferent to whether there is somewhere to put a person. The absence of room is written down as a fact with weight, not as a minor inconvenience in a busy week.

You have the authority to make room, and making it has never once been a small thing. The Spirit of God is the one who makes four words from a Christmas reading reach a woman moving crates in her own front room, and Luke 2:7 names the lack of room as the reason the whole scene happened the way it did.

What the joke was

Let me say what the joke was doing, because it was not humor.

A joke is how a person says a true thing they cannot say straight. You have said there is nowhere to put a tree five or six times in two years, to different people, laughing each time, and every one of those was an accurate report delivered in a form nobody has to respond to.

You were telling the truth in a form nobody had to answer, and it has never once needed to be a joke. The Holy Spirit is the one who shows a woman what her own joke was carrying, and the written word records the absence of room plainly in Luke 2:7 with no attempt to make it light.

And here is what has happened alongside it. The family has stopped proposing things. Nobody suggests having people round, nobody asks about the camp bed, and the children do not start anything on the floor any more.

They are not sulking. They have learned what this house can currently do, and they are planning around it, and none of them would be able to tell you when they started.

You are able to give one square of floor back, and giving it has never once cost the work anything that matters. His Spirit is the one who lets a woman hear her own joke properly, and Luke 2:7 treats the question of room as serious enough to name in the middle of the best news there has ever been.

One square of floor

So here is the exercise, and it is one square rather than the room.

Make one clear square of floor. In the main room, big enough for two children to sit on and build something, or for a tree, or for somebody to put a suitcase down.

You are able to clear one square today, and clearing it has never once been a retreat. Luke 2:7 puts the absence of room on the page as a thing that mattered, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes one corner of a living room possible this afternoon.

Then keep it clear for one week. That is the part that takes the doing. Clear floor in a house like this is the most useful surface there is and by Thursday there will be two bags on it.

Move them off. Every time. Seven days of moving things off one square of floor is what actually makes the floor exist.

You were never required to fill every corner, and you are not required to now. The Spirit of God carries a woman past the logic that filled the room one box at a time, and the written word names the lack of room as the reason for a manger in Luke 2:7.