The Track Up To The House

Golden hour, and the light is coming flat along the ruts so the whole track looks like it is made of brass. Sherman is in the chair on the north end of the porch, which is where he sits, because from that chair he can see the entire quarter mile from the mailbox to the cattle guard.

A truck turns in off the road.

By the first culvert he has the make. By the second he has the speed, and speed tells him more than anything else, because a man coming up here with something to ask always slows around the second culvert, every single time, as though the track itself were making him consider it. By the third culvert Sherman has the whole thing worked out: who is driving, what they want, roughly how long it takes, and whether he is going to be busy in the shop when they arrive.

Tonight he is going to be busy in the shop.

He gets up and goes, unhurried, and by the time the tires come over the cattle guard he has a grinder in his hand and a piece of angle iron in the vise and a good honest reason not to have heard a knock.

Here is the thing about Sherman. He is not a mean man. Ask anybody. He was on the volunteer fire department for twenty two years and he went out at three in the morning in January more times than his wife could count, and there is a man alive in this county today who would not be, and Sherman has never mentioned it to a soul.

The system came in slowly and nobody could tell you the year. It came in the way a path gets worn. A few things asked and asked again. A stretch where the track was busy for the wrong reasons. Some tiredness that never quite got slept off. And at some point the deciding, which used to happen at the porch step when a man had his hat in his hand and a face on him, moved down the track. First to the cattle guard. Then to the third culvert. Then to the second, and then to the sound of the tires turning in off the road, and now Sherman knows before he knows.

That is the whole thing. Not hardness. Efficiency. He has become very good at deciding in advance who he is not going to get involved with, and it has saved him a great deal of time, and it works.

The grinder throws its sparks and the truck sits out in the yard for a while and then reverses and goes back down between the fence lines, and the light goes off the top of the hill.

You have a track. It might not have culverts on it. It might be a name coming up on your phone, or a knock at a particular hour, or the shape of an email in the first three words, or the walk from your car to your own door past a house you have decided about. And you make the call early now, further out every year, and it is efficient, and it works, and somewhere in you there is a man who used to go out at three in the morning in January and you are not certain where he went.

The Decision You Made Before They Got Here

Let me be honest about how this starts, because if I begin by scolding you for it, you have every right to close the page.

It starts as good sense.

A man who has been asked for a great deal learns to read a situation early, and reading a situation early is not a defect. It is exactly what an experienced person has that a green one does not. Sherman can tell you at four hundred yards what a young man would not work out standing in the yard, and there is nothing wrong with that eye. It was earned.

You have been deciding about people at a quarter mile, and it began as good sense rather than as coldness. Proverbs 27:12 already commended the man who sees trouble coming and takes cover, and the Spirit is not asking you to hand your judgment in at the gate this evening.

What went wrong is not the eye. It is that the eye stopped reporting to anybody. It used to hand its findings to a man on a porch who then decided. Now it decides on its own, at the second culvert, and the man on the porch simply gets told, and the difference between those two arrangements is the difference between discernment and a default.

You are holding a setting rather than a character, and a setting is the kind of thing that changes tonight. That is Scripture, not sentiment, and the Holy Spirit is what makes it move: He renews a mind, and a default is precisely the sort of thing a renewed mind quietly loses.

That is the good news in this whole message and I want you to have it before we go one line further. You are not a cold man who must now be made warm, which would take years and probably would not work. You are a warm man with a setting on him, and settings get moved.

You were made for an ordinary open handedness, and it has been in you the entire time underneath the system. You are not taking my word for it. His word says to be given to hospitality, which is not an event or a program but a way a house sits on a road, and the Spirit is what carries a plain instruction like that off a page and down a farm track at golden hour.

The Doors Were Open To The Road

Now I want to show you a man defending his own life, because that is what Job is doing in chapter thirty one, and look at what he reaches for.

The stranger did not lodge in the street: but I opened my doors to the traveller.Job 31:32

He is not describing an occasion. He is not saying that once, in a hard winter, he made an exception. He is describing the way his house stood on the road for years, as a matter of setting, so that in the whole of that time nobody who came past had to sleep outside in the street.

That is the ordinary position of a door in a merciful life. Not flung wide to whatever comes. Not bolted by default. Just the ordinary position, unlatched, the way a door sits when the person inside has not made a decision about the road.

You are standing at the end of a track that God has never once treated as a checkpoint. It is written down, in Job 31:32, that the stranger did not lodge in the street because a man opened his doors to the traveler, and the same Spirit who kept that line inside a man's defense of his own life is out on your porch this evening in the last of the light.

Now the limits, and I am going to be very plain, because this is where an article like this can do harm.

An open door is not an unlimited one. It has never meant handing your house to anybody who turns in off the road. It does not mean admitting a person who is not safe. It does not mean saying yes to every request, or being available at every hour, or letting somebody move into your week because they knocked. You are free to keep every limit you have, and an open setting has never meant an open ended one. No permission of mine could give you that. Scripture does, where it says be wise as serpents and harmless as doves, both halves in the same short sentence, and His Spirit is what keeps wisdom and mercy standing in the same man.

Wise and harmless. That is the man Job was, and that is the man on the porch tonight, and neither half is optional.

And one more thing about a door, which is the thing this whole site has been keeping for you.

Nothing comes back through it. That is not a disappointment; that is the design. A merciful house is not an arrangement where good sent out at the road end returns up the track later with something for you. You have been given a door, and nothing is owed to you through it. The Spirit settled that long before you read a word of this, and Matthew 6:3 says it plainly: do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. A hand that does not know cannot keep an account.