I Apologize For My House

It happens before they are through the door.

Somebody arrives, and the door opens, and out it comes. Sorry about the hallway. Sorry about the state of it. Do not look at the far wall. I have been meaning to get to that.

And it is out of your mouth so fast that there is no decision in it anywhere.

They say it is fine, because it is fine, and they mean it. And then the visit happens and it is perfectly good, and afterward you think about the first four seconds and not about the two hours.

Here is something worth noticing before anything else. That apology is not really for them.

It is a defense. It gets said first so that nobody else can say it, and it is spoken by a woman who has decided that the house is going to be commented on and has chosen to be the one who does the commenting.

And the cost of it lands nowhere near the hallway. It lands on the first four seconds of every visit anybody makes to this house.

You are a woman greeting somebody at her own door, and an apology said in the first four seconds has never once been the thing your visitor came for.

Have mercy upon me, O LORD

There is a line in the thirty first psalm where a man says exactly what is wrong, and he says it to the right person.

Have mercy upon me, O LORD, for I am in trouble: mine eye is consumed with grief, yea, my soul and my belly. (Psalm 31:9, King James Version)

For I am in trouble.

It is blunt. There is no arrangement of it, no softening, no apology for taking up the time. He states the trouble plainly and he states it upward, and the whole of the verse is addressed to somebody who can actually do something with it.

And notice he does not perform it for an audience. He is not announcing his state to the room in order to manage what the room thinks of him.

You have a place to put the trouble that is not the doorstep, and a plain sentence said upward has never once needed a visitor standing there to hear it. Psalm 31:9 sends the whole thing to the LORD rather than to the company, and the Holy Spirit is the one who receives what has been getting said to guests instead.

And look at how specific it gets. Mine eye is consumed with grief, yea, my soul and my belly. The eye, the soul, and the stomach. He names where it has landed in his body.

That is not self pity. That is accuracy, offered to somebody trustworthy, and there is a great deal of difference between saying a true thing upward and saying a defensive thing sideways.

You were built to say the true thing to the one who can hold it, and an accurate account of what something costs has never once been self pity. The Spirit of God is the one who can hold the eye and the soul and the belly at once, and Psalm 31:9 names all three without a word of apology for naming them.

What the doorstep apology is doing

So here is the practical part, and none of it is a rebuke.

The apology is protective and it works, in the narrow sense that saying a thing first does take the sting out of somebody else saying it. That is real. It is not stupid.

But it has three costs and they are worth seeing laid out.

The first is that it tells the visitor to look. Nobody had noticed the far wall. They do now, because they have just been directed to it by the person who lives here.

You are pointing at something nobody had seen, and the hallway has never once introduced itself to anybody who walked through it. Psalm 31:9 puts the trouble in front of God rather than in front of the guest, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a woman from having to manage a room she has already let people into.

The second cost is that it makes the visitor do work. Now they have to reassure you. That is a small task and a kind one and they will do it gladly, and it is still a task, and it is the first thing they do after taking their coat off.

You have said that sentence about two hundred times at your own threshold, and a thing repeated has never once become true by being repeated. That is the third cost and it is the one that has been running longest, because nobody says sorry about my house two hundred times without starting to believe a home is the kind of thing a person apologizes for. Psalm 31:9 takes the real trouble upward instead, and the Spirit of God is the one who can stop a sentence that has been running for years.

You were greeting people at this door long before any of this started, and three years of one sentence has never once overwritten forty years of another. The Spirit of God is the one who gives a woman her own welcome back, and Psalm 31:9 shows a man saying the true thing to the only one who can answer it.

Let the next one in, and say something else

Here is the assignment, and it is a substitution rather than a prohibition.

The next time somebody comes to the door, do not apologize for anything. Not the hallway, not the state of it, not the far wall.

That will leave a gap of about four seconds, and the gap is unbearable, which is why you need something to put in it.

So have an ordinary sentence ready. Come in, the coffee is on. Take your coat off, it is freezing out there. Ordinary. Whatever you would have said in nineteen ninety two before any of this started.

You have one ordinary sentence available for the door tonight, and greeting somebody plainly has never once required the house to be finished first. Psalm 31:9 hands the trouble to the LORD in plain words, and the Holy Spirit is the one standing in that hallway for the whole four seconds.

And then take the real sentence, the one about what it costs you, and say it upward instead. Later, on your own, in the kitchen. That one is true and it deserves to be said and it was always meant to go somewhere else.

That is the substitution. Not silence. A redirection.