The Wall I Walk Past

There are about forty of them and he could not tell you the order.

It started with three, when they moved in, and it has grown the way those walls grow, which is by nobody ever deciding anything. A christening. Two weddings. A holiday where it rained the whole week and there is a photograph of all of them under one awning laughing at something nobody now remembers.

His wife did the arranging. He put the hooks in.

And he walks past it eight times a day. More. Kitchen to front door, front door to stairs, stairs to kitchen, all day, every day, for about thirty years, and if you stopped him on the landing and asked him what is on the left as you come out of the kitchen he would have to think about it.

That is not a criticism of him. That is what a hallway is.

Last night, though, at about eleven, he was going through to lock up and he stopped.

He does not know why. He was not thinking about anything.

And he stood in front of it for a while with the hall light on and he found one, second row, half hidden behind a bigger one, from a summer that he would have said, if you had asked him, was a bad year.

And it is not a photograph of anything. Four people at a table outside a rented place with the paper cloth blowing about.

And he stood there and thought: that was the middle of the worst two years we have had.

And I do not remember it being like that at all in that picture.

And you know that, because there is a wall or a shelf or a folder that you go past every day and have stopped seeing.

What you walk past every day

Let us settle what governs this whole page. Nothing on it is being asked of you, there is no appeal at the bottom, and nobody here is going to make your list for you.

You are looking at an invitation, and the One being tested inside it is God. Follow the verb in the famous sentence and it lands on Him. He is under examination. He is the one who offered to be found out. It is written, put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts (Malachi 3:10), and the Holy Spirit is the One who lets a reader hear that verb land where it actually lands.

Here it is, in its own room:

Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.Malachi 3:10

Said to a nation, in one decade, about one building, where the store room had emptied and the families who worked there had gone home hungry. It is a sentence about people eating, and it was never a lever.

And here is what belongs to this page.

God had already been faithful to those people for centuries before He ever invited them to test Him, and He was already faithful to you long before you stopped in your own hallway. That invitation comes at the end of a very long book, spoken to a people whose whole story is a record of what He had already done. The test was never the beginning. It was an invitation to see what was already on the wall. It is the Holy Spirit, and not this page, who takes that and puts it under a hall light at eleven at night.

Now the walking past, and it needs the truth rather than a scolding.

It is not ingratitude. Nobody here is going to suggest that a man who cannot describe his own hallway has failed to appreciate his family, and if anybody has ever implied something like that to you, they were wrong and it was unkind.

It is what eyes do. A thing you see eight times a day stops being visible on about the ninth, and that is not a moral fact about you, it is how seeing works, and Scripture assumes it about everybody.

God knows people stop seeing, and He has repeatedly told them to put something physical in the way of it. After the river, twelve stones were carried up and stacked, and the reason given is that when your children ask in time to come, what do these stones mean, you shall tell them (Joshua 4:6). It is a heap of rocks arranged so that somebody would have to say a thing out loud. And after a hard day, a man set up a stone and named it, and said, till now the Lord has helped us (1 Samuel 7:12). Your hallway is that, and your wife built it, and nobody in the house has read it in years.

And here is the passage for a man who has stopped in front of something.

He asked them. When I sent you out with no purse, He said, did you lack anything? And they said, nothing (Luke 22:35).

Somebody had to point at it. Even for them. And the moment somebody did, the answer came straight back, because it was there the whole time and had simply stopped being visible.

You are not being asked to feel something in the hallway, you are being asked to look at it properly, and those are two different jobs. It is written that you shall remember the whole way the Lord your God has led you (Deuteronomy 8:2), and remembering there is an action rather than a mood. His Spirit is what makes it a stop in a corridor rather than a feeling you have to manufacture.

Now the guardrails, and they are why this page hands you less than it might.

Nobody here is going to name your three, because three of somebody else's on your wall is no use to anybody.

And nobody is going to turn them into a pattern. When you have them, they will not predict the next thirty years, they are not a system, and they do not add up to a forecast about your family. They are three things that happened. That is enough. It is the Holy Spirit who does the carrying here, which is what separates a word being spoken over you from a phrase being repeated at you.

God proved Himself to you across all of it long before anybody suggested testing Him, and the finding out is looking rather than earning. It is written that He is the same yesterday and today and forever (Hebrews 13:8), which means the summer in that photograph and the man standing in the hall tonight are dealing with the same Person.