The Latch She Started Using

The latch is small and brass and it cost almost nothing, and a man came on a Thursday in March and fitted it in under twenty minutes and had a cup of tea afterward and told Frances it was long overdue.

Before that Thursday, the door had been unlatched for thirty years. Before that it was her mother's door and it was unlatched then too. In summer it stood open with the light coming through the passage and the flies coming with it, and people walked in mid sentence, and the whole shape of that house was a hallway you could get into.

Now, in the evening, Frances slides the latch across. It makes a small dry click, twice, once as it goes and once as it seats. She has heard that sound about four thousand times and she does not notice it anymore, in the way you stop noticing your own clock.

And she would tell you, and she is right, that it was sensible. She is a woman on her own at the end of a lane. Nobody in this valley would say a word against a latch.

But here is what happened afterward, and no one fitted it and no one had a cup of tea about it.

Somewhere in the years that followed, Frances started deciding at the window.

It is quicker. You see who is on the path before they are halfway up it, and by the time the knock comes you have already worked out what you are going to say and how long it is going to take. And there is a list now, which she has never written down and could recite to you in about four seconds. Not the one who talks. Not the one who wants something. Not the family from the second turning, because that was a whole afternoon once and she has learned. Not on a Sunday. Not after seven.

The list is not cruel. That is the thing about it. Every single item on it was earned honestly, by an evening she did not get back, and if you sat with her at her own table she could tell you the story behind each one and you would nod at every one of them.

The second chair by the stove has a laundry basket on it now, and has had for some years. The coir mat on the step wore through in a bad winter and she did not get another, because what is the point of a mat if nobody is standing on it.

Tonight it is not quite dark and the last of the light is coming along the wall of the lane. Somebody is at the gate. And before Frances has even got out of the chair, before she can see a face, before she knows whether the person at her gate is asking for something or bringing something or is lost, the whole machinery has already run, and the answer is already there, and it arrived without her.

You know that latch. Maybe yours is a phone that stays face down, or the answer you give before you have heard the whole question, or the small efficient way you have of finishing a conversation. You are not a hard person and you never were. You just got very good, over a number of reasonable years, at deciding in advance who you are not going to get involved with.

The Latch Is Not The Problem. The List Is.

Let me say the first thing clearly, so that nothing after it gets heard as an accusation.

Keep the latch.

I mean that. Nothing on this page is asking you to take a lock off a door, admit anybody you do not want in your house, or become a woman with no sense at the end of a lane. A latch is a latch. It is a piece of brass. It is not a spiritual condition.

You are holding a door that God has never once asked you to take off its hinges. That is Scripture and not sentiment, in Proverbs 4:23, keep your heart with all diligence, and the Holy Spirit is what makes a sentence about guarding sit comfortably beside a sentence about opening.

The trouble is not the brass. The trouble is the list, and the difference between them is worth about a hundred evenings of your life.

A latch is an act. You do it, once, at ten o'clock, and then it is done and it holds until morning. A list is a setting. It runs before you get to the door. It runs while you are still in the chair. It decides, from a window, on a face you have not properly seen yet, and it hands you an answer with such speed and such confidence that it does not feel like a decision at all. It feels like knowing.

You have been given a setting rather than a list of exceptions. Colossians 3:12 says to put on tender mercies and kindness the way a person puts on a coat, and the Spirit is what makes that a thing you wear rather than a thing you achieve on your better days.

That is the whole subject of this piece. Not one heroic opening. A setting. The ordinary way a door works in a house, on a Tuesday, without anybody being brave.

You Cannot See Who Is On The Step

Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.Hebrews 13:2

People misread that verse constantly and always in the same direction. They hear a lottery: open the door and you might get an angel, so it is worth the risk of the ones who are not.

That is not it, and if it were it would be the sort of arrangement this whole site refuses. Nothing is coming back to you for opening a door. There is no prize behind any of them.

Read the actual word. Unawares. The entire weight of that sentence sits on what the people in it did not know. They were not identifying angels. They could not. They were doing the ordinary thing with the ordinary person on the step, and the identity of the person only came out afterward, and the point is not what the visitor turned out to be. The point is that the host had no way of telling.

You were never able to sort them accurately from a window, and that is not a fault in you. No sentence of mine could hand you that. Scripture does, in Matthew 25:40, where the ones who did the good are astonished to find out who they had actually done it to, and His Spirit is the one who runs that sorting rather than you.

Sit with that for a second, because it is the relief hiding inside the whole thing. Your list has always been operating on partial information. Not because you are careless. Because there is no other kind of information available at a gate at dusk.

You are standing at a door whose visitors you were never meant to read in advance. Psalm 121:8 says He keeps your going out and your coming in, and the Spirit is the one doing the keeping, at both ends, including the end you were trying to guard with a list.

So the list can go and the latch can stay. Those are separate objects. You have permission to keep the latch and let go of the list. The Spirit put that in you long before you read it here, and Romans 12:13 says it plainly, given to hospitality, which describes a manner and not a schedule of approved visitors.

And nothing here turns your door into a duty without limits. You are allowed to be tired. You are allowed to say no tonight. You are allowed to keep a person out who is not safe for you to be near, and if what is at your gate is genuinely frightening, then the right and merciful move is not to open it but to reach a human being who can help: emergency services or a local line, today, without apology. Mercy has never once required anybody to walk toward harm, and a woman at the end of a lane is not less merciful for locking a door.