The Extra Chairs In The Shed

The porch faces west, which is the whole reason Walt bought the house, and at this hour the light comes in under the roof and lays itself along the boards and makes everything out here look better than it is.

There are two chairs on the porch. One of them is his. The other one has a folded newspaper on it that has been there since the middle of last week.

The porch is very tidy. It has been very tidy for about four years.

Out back, past the tomatoes, there is a shed with a padlock on it that Walt keeps oiled because he keeps everything oiled. Inside the shed, against the left wall, there are eight folding chairs stacked and leaned. There is a long table that comes apart and lives on two sawhorses. There is a pop up canopy in a bag with a broken zipper. There is a cooler big enough to put a person in.

Twelve years ago all of that was out on the grass most weekends. His wife ran it and he carried it and the yard was loud until ten at night and there were kids asleep on the porch swing by the end of it.

She has been gone six years. That is not what this is about, though, and Walt would tell you so himself, because the chairs kept coming out for the first two years after.

What actually happened is smaller and harder to say.

Somewhere in there, Walt got very good at reading people fast. He can stand in a checkout line for ninety seconds and know whether the man ahead of him is going to be a lot. He does it at church, he does it at the hardware store, he does it in the four seconds it takes somebody to walk from the curb to his gate. It is not unkindness. He would help any one of them if they asked him plainly for a thing he could do. But he has developed a sorting that runs before he has thought about it, and the outcome of the sorting is almost always the same, and the outcome is: not this one.

Three doors down there is a moving truck that came last Tuesday. He watched it from this porch. New family, two kids, and a woman who could not work out which way the couch had to go through the door, and Walt stood right here with a glass of tea and thought, that is going to be a whole thing, and did not go over.

He is not proud of that. He is not ashamed of it either. It just happened the way water goes downhill.

The sun gets low enough that it comes in flat under the porch roof and lights up the dust and the arm of the empty chair with the newspaper on it.

Eight chairs. Padlocked. Spiders on the top one by now.

You have a shed like that. Maybe it is not chairs. Maybe it is a spare room that has become an office, or a table that seats ten and never does, or a Saturday you have decided in advance is yours. You have the capacity. That is the strange part, and it is why this one sits so uncomfortably: it is not that you have nothing. It is that you have got extremely good at deciding, before anybody has even knocked, who you are not going to get involved with, and lately you have started to notice yourself doing it.

The Sorting Happens Before Anybody Knocks

Let us name what this actually is, because naming it wrongly is how a person ends up carrying guilt instead of chairs.

You are holding capacity, and capacity is not the same thing as an obligation. 1 Peter 4:9 asks for hospitality and not for a household converted into a facility, and the Spirit is not asking anybody to sign something this evening.

Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling.1 Peter 4:9

Notice how short it is, and notice the strange second half. He does not say be more hospitable. He says do it without the muttering, which tells you that the people He was writing to were already doing it and were already complaining about it, which is oddly comforting at this distance.

You have been sorting people before they ever reached the gate, and the sorting is a habit and not your heart. The Spirit put the discomfort you felt reading that last paragraph there, not me, and it is written into James 2:1 in plain enough words: faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and the weighing up of persons do not sit down together.

Here is the thing about a default. A decision is loud. You know when you make one. A default is silent, and it runs when you are not looking, and by the time you notice it you have four years of evidence that says this is simply who you are.

It is not who you are. It is a setting.

You are being invited and not conscripted. That is Scripture and not a soft reading of it, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps an invitation from hardening into a demand somewhere between your ears and your hands.

An Open Door Still Has A Frame

Now the honest objection, because if it is not answered this article is dangerous.

An open door is not a door off its hinges. Nothing on this page asks you to let in whoever turns up, and nothing here says that a man who keeps a limit has failed at mercy.

You are being handed a door with a frame still on it, and the frame is not a failure of love. You do not have to take that from me. His word tells the prudent to see trouble coming and take shelter, Proverbs 27:12, and the Spirit is the one who gives a person the plain sense to know a stranger from a danger.

If somebody has hurt you, or would, this is not about them and it never was. You owe nobody access to your porch. Mercy is not the same as availability, and God has never once asked anybody to stand in the path of harm and call it hospitality.

What is on the table is much smaller than that, and this is where the whole category lands.

You have permission to be merciful at a size you can actually manage. No rule of mine could set that size for anybody. Scripture does, and His Spirit does, because Mark 14:8 has Jesus saying of one woman that she has done what she could, and He said it as praise and not as a measurement she came up short on.

She has done what she could. Read that as a ceiling and it is a rebuke. Read it the way He said it and it is a release. There is no version of this where you are asked for more than you have, and there is no version where somebody who did the small thing gets told the small thing did not count.

You are being changed at the level of your default, and a default is a much quieter thing to change than a character. It is written down, in 1 Peter 4:9, that the hospitality goes out without the grumbling, and the same Spirit who put those two extra words on the end of that verse is at work on the muttering a good while before He gets to the chairs.

And one more thing, plainly, because this is the landing category and it must not be left crooked. Nothing that goes out of your shed comes back to you with interest. That is not how any of this works and it is not why any of it is worth doing. Nobody sitting in one of those chairs owes you anything, God is not entering it anywhere, and if you are hoping the open door pays, the door is not open, it is trading.