The Bolt On The Courtyard Gate

Twenty to six, and the courtyard is all one color. The vine over the far wall is still just a shape. There is a bucket by the faucet with a skin of cold water in it and Tomas comes out in his coat with the collar up to fetch it in.

On the way past he puts his hand on the bolt.

Not to open it. To check it. His hand goes out on its own, the way it does every morning, and finds the bolt already across, which is how it should be, because he put it across last night.

He stands there a second with his fingers on the cold iron.

He does not remember putting it across.

That is the thing. Not that it is bolted, but that there is no memory attached to the bolting. No evening where he thought right, that is going across tonight. Just a hand at a gate at some hour, doing what a hand does.

His father never bolted that gate. Forty years in this house and the bolt sat back in its keep and went green at the edges and was, as far as anybody could tell, decorative. Tomas's father put it on the gate himself, drilled the holes, screwed it down, and then apparently never once used it, which as a fact about a man tells you almost everything.

People came through that gate. The man selling the eggs. The woman from the top of the lane who did not knock and did not need to. Kids after a ball. A stranger, twice that Tomas can remember, both times somebody lost, both times fed.

The light starts coming over the wall and the vine goes from a shape into a vine.

Out in the lane somebody is coming up with a wheeled cart, the small metal wheels going over the stones with that particular clatter. It slows a little as it passes the gate. Tomas is standing on his own side of it with the bucket in his hand, and he takes one step back into the shadow of the doorway.

He does not decide to do that either.

The cart goes on up the lane and the sound of it gets thin and stops. Tomas stands in the doorway a moment longer than he needs to, then comes out and puts the bucket down and looks at the bolt in the new light, green at the edges.

And here is what he cannot do, and it bothers him more than the bolt does. He cannot name the day. There was no break in. Nothing was ever taken out of that courtyard. Nobody did anything to him at that gate. There is no story here at all, and that is precisely the trouble: a man can point to the day he was robbed, and he can do something about a day. He cannot do anything about a slow change of setting that never announced itself.

You know that gate. Maybe there is no courtyard and no lane. Maybe it is a phone that sends anybody unknown straight to voicemail, a blind you now pull at four, a route home you changed so you do not go past a certain door, a habit of deciding in advance who you are not going to get involved with. And nobody did anything to you either. It just quietly became the ordinary thing to do, and you cannot name the day, and stepping back into a doorway takes no decision at all now.

The gate your father never bolted

There is one short line in one of the shortest letters in the New Testament that describes what your father was doing at that gate, and describes it as a virtue rather than as an eccentricity.

You are looking at a setting, not at a decision you ever made. 3 John 1:5 calls it faithfulness and treats it as a way a man is rather than a thing a man performs, and the Spirit is not asking anybody to reconstruct the day it changed.

Beloved, thou doest faithfully whatsoever thou doest to the brethren, and to strangers.3 John 1:5

Look at what that sentence does not do. It does not split the world into two lists with two different doors. The brethren, and strangers, and the same word covering both: faithfully. It is not two policies. It is one setting, applied without the man having to work out each time which category is at the gate.

That is what a setting is, and it is why your father never had to be a hero about it. He was not making a courageous decision every evening at dusk. He simply was a man whose gate was on the latch, and the being was doing the work, which is why he could keep it up for forty years without ever once mentioning it to anybody.

You have not become somebody else, and nothing in you needed replacing for a bolt to start going across. That is Scripture and not sentiment, and His Spirit is what makes it stand at twenty to six on a cold morning.

Settings drift. That is what they do. A man who has been tired, or disappointed, or simply older and slower on the stairs will find his hands making small arrangements on his behalf, and none of it comes with an announcement, and none of it is a moral event. The reason you cannot name the day is that there was no day. There was a hundred evenings, and a hand, and a bolt.

You were shown this by somebody who went before you, and that showing has not worn off you. The Spirit was at work in what your father did with a latch a long time before anybody wrote it down for you, and it is written into 3 John 1:5 in words that fit a courtyard exactly: the same faithfulness, to the brethren, and to strangers.

Open is a setting, not a promise

Now the thing that has to be said, because this is where articles like this one usually go wrong and do damage.

Nobody here is asking you to take the bolt off the gate.

You are being handed a setting, not a vow. You do not have to take my word for that. His word commends an open house in one line and names a man causing real trouble a few lines further down the very same letter, and the Spirit has never once asked anybody to choose between being open and being awake.

That is worth sitting with, because people quote the hospitality half of that letter constantly and skip the rest. It is the same page. John praises a man for his faithfulness to strangers and then, without any embarrassment, tells the truth about somebody doing harm. Open and discerning, in one short letter, with no apology for either.

So keep every lock that is actually keeping you safe. Keep them all. If some part of you goes quiet and careful about a particular person or a particular door, that is worth listening to, and nothing in this article is asking you to override it. An open gate is not a promise to admit whoever arrives, and mercy has never meant standing in a place that harms you.

You have every lock you genuinely need, and not one of them is in question here. No sentence of mine could hand you that permission. Scripture does, plainly, in the same letter, and His Spirit does.

What we are talking about is much smaller and much stranger than a lock. We are talking about the things you have closed that were never protecting you from anything. The step back into the doorway. The blind at four. The way you now decide, in advance, at a distance, before anybody has even asked, who you are not going to be involved with. None of those is security. Security has a reason and you can name it. These have no day attached to them at all.

You are being met by a God who has taken in strangers at His own gate for as long as there have been strangers. It is written down, in Matthew 25:35, I was a stranger and ye took me in, and the same Spirit who put that line there is standing in the first light of your courtyard while you look at a bolt gone green at the edges.