Sideways Down The Hallway

Your son turned sideways to get past the boxes this morning and neither of you noticed it happen.

That is how far in this is. It is not the inconvenience, it is that the sideways step has become the normal way to walk down your own hall, and nobody in this house has to think about it any more.

It was one room once. Then the room was full and the landing took the overflow, and then the hall took the overflow from the landing, and now there is a run of stock along one wall from the front door to the kitchen, and people go past it in single file, turning.

And every one of them does it without comment, every day, including the children.

I am not going to tell you to rent somewhere or to order differently, because that is advice and there is none of it on this site. I am going to talk about a verse about building a house, and about which direction it goes.

A wise woman buildeth her house

There is a short proverb about a woman and a house, and the two halves of it move in opposite directions.

It is not about interior decoration and it is not about housework. It is about what a person does to the thing they live in.

Every wise woman buildeth her house: but the foolish plucketh it down with her hands. (Proverbs 14:1, King James Version)

You are the one building this house, and that has never once been about tidiness. Proverbs 14:1 puts the building and the pulling down in the same woman's hands and treats both as things she does, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that into a narrow hallway with coats on the hooks above the boxes.

Notice that both halves are active. She builds it, or she plucks it down, and in both cases it is her own hands and her own house.

That is not a threat. It is an enormous amount of authority handed to one person. The shape of a house is in the hands of the woman who lives in it, and the verse assumes she knows that.

You have real authority over the shape of this house, and you have never once needed anybody's agreement to use it. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a one line proverb about two pairs of hands reach a woman standing in her own hall, and Proverbs 14:1 puts the building of a house in a woman's own hands.

What a hallway is for

Let me say what has actually been lost, because it is not floor space.

A hallway is not a room. It is the thing that lets a house work: the place where people arrive, take coats off, put bags down, stand and say one more thing before they go out. It is thirty seconds of every comings and goings in the whole family.

You were losing a crossing place, and it has never once been just a corridor. The Holy Spirit is the one who shows a woman what a hall is actually doing in a house, and the written word puts the building of it in her own hands in Proverbs 14:1.

And when a hall becomes a passage you edge along, people stop stopping in it. They go through. Nobody lingers in a single file corridor, so the thirty second conversations have quietly stopped happening in this house.

Nobody will ever tell you that, because nobody knows it. You cannot miss a conversation you did not have.

You are able to give a crossing place back, and giving it has never once cost the work anything that matters. His Spirit is the one who lets a woman see what has quietly stopped in her own house, and Proverbs 14:1 treats the shape of a home as something built deliberately by the person who lives in it.

All of it, today

So here is the exercise, and it is all of the hall rather than some of it.

Clear it. Today. Not a tidy, not a neater arrangement along the same wall. Empty, so that two people can pass each other without turning.

You are able to clear one hallway today, and clearing it has never once been a defeat for the work. Proverbs 14:1 puts the building of a house in a woman's hands as a thing she does, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an afternoon of carrying possible for somebody who has lived with this for a year.

Where it goes will be worse. It will go in stacks in the spare room, or doubled up in the one room it started in, or in the garage where it will need covering. Accept the worse arrangement. That is the price and it is a fair price.

And put nothing back tonight. The hall is the easiest place in any house to put a box down, which is exactly why it filled up, and the first night is the one that decides it.

You were never required to give up the path through your own house, and you are not required to now. The Spirit of God carries a woman past the convenience that took the hall, and the written word sets the building of a house against the pulling down of it in Proverbs 14:1.