Somebody Came To The Door

There were two seconds between the knock and the decision.

You know those two seconds. There is a knock, and before anything conscious happens you have already run a calculation, and the calculation is: what do I look like right now, and who is that likely to be, and is the overlap between those two things acceptable.

And if it is not, you stand very still in your own hallway until they go away.

Or you answer it, and the whole conversation happens with about a fifth of you occupied by the fact of your own face, and you cut it shorter than you meant to, and afterward you are tired in a way that a two minute conversation should not have made you.

I want to say something about this and I want to say it plainly, and I am going to be careful, because this is the last article on this site and there is a way to get it wrong.

I am not going to tell you to stop wearing makeup.

That would be an enormous mistake and it would undo everything the last six articles have been doing. It would take one more thing off you and put a new rule in its place, and a rule is a correction, and correction is what we have spent this whole site getting out from under. If you like it, wear it. It is not a moral question and it never was.

The subject is not what is on your face. It is the list.

Because there is a list. You have never written it down, but you could tell me who is on it. The people who are allowed to see you as you are. And it is shorter than it was ten years ago, and there are people who have quietly come off it, and you did not decide that either.

That is the thing worth looking at. Not the makeup. The shrinking.

Their faces were not ashamed

There is a line in Psalm 34 that mentions faces specifically, and it is doing something more precise than a general encouragement.

They looked unto him, and were lightened: and their faces were not ashamed. (Psalm 34:5, King James Version)

Their faces were not ashamed.

Notice the direction of it. They looked unto him. Not at themselves, not at each other, not at a reflection. The looking goes outward and lands on God, and the result comes back and shows up on the face.

Which is a very different mechanism from the one you have been using.

You have been trying to arrive at a face you are not ashamed of by working on the face. That is looking inward at the problem and staying there, and it does not resolve, because a face examined for long enough always produces something.

The verse describes the opposite motion. The face is not the object being fixed. It is where something arrives from somewhere else.

And there is one more thing in that sentence, and it is the word ashamed rather than the word beautiful.

Shame is not about how a thing looks. Shame is about being seen. You can be ashamed of something nobody would think twice about, and you can be entirely unbothered by something objectively worse, and the difference is not the thing itself, it is whether being seen with it feels survivable.

That is why the two seconds at the door are so expensive. It was never a question about your appearance. It was a question about exposure.

What is happening in those two seconds is about being seen and not about how you look, and shame has never once been a report on a face. Psalm 34:5 sends the looking outward and lets the face be where the light lands, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns a person's attention away from her own reflection.

The list gets shorter on its own

Here is the part I actually want you to have, and it is the reason this row closes the site.

Nobody decides to shrink the list. It shrinks by attrition.

There was a day when you were not quite ready and somebody came, and it was uncomfortable, and so the next time you were slightly more careful with that person. And then a bit more careful. And after a few years that person is somebody you get ready for, and you could not name the day it changed.

Multiply that by a decade and the list is down to two or three people, and there are relationships in your life that now have a small permanent cost attached to them that nobody else knows about.

That cost is the real thing this article is about. Not vanity. The quiet expense of being at slight readiness around people you love.

And it compounds, because a person you have to get ready for is a person you see less. You put things off. You suggest later instead of now. And none of that ever presents itself as being about a face. It presents itself as being busy.

You are able to stop paying a small toll on the people you love, and that shortening list has never once been something you decided. The written word puts the face where light arrives rather than where work is done, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a person be seen without it costing her anything.

Answer it once

So here is the assignment, and it is the last one on this site.

Answer the door once this week exactly as you are.

Once. Not a policy. Not a decision about how you are going to live. One door, one time, in whatever state you happen to be in when somebody knocks.

And do not explain yourself. This is the whole discipline. Do not open with sorry about the state of me, do not say you were not expecting anybody, do not gesture at your own face.

Because the apology is the thing that does the damage, far more than the face does. The apology tells the person at the door that they have been shown something below standard, and it teaches you, again, that being seen requires a defense.

Just say hello.

They will not notice. That is not encouragement, it is simply true. People are extremely occupied with themselves and are almost never studying you.

You are able to be seen without offering an explanation for it, and the apology has never once been what anybody at the door required. Psalm 34:5 records faces that were not ashamed after the looking went outward, and the Holy Spirit is the one standing in the hallway with you in the two seconds after a knock.