I Only See It When Someone Visits

It takes about a second and a half.

Somebody comes in, and they are talking, and they are perfectly nice, and somewhere in the first sentence their eyes go across the room and stop. Just for a moment. And then they carry on talking.

And in that moment the whole room rearranges itself for you. The thing you have not looked at in eight months is suddenly the only object in it, lit from the front, three times its actual size.

They have already moved on. They were never really thinking about it. But for the rest of the visit, and for about two days afterward, that is what your house is.

Then it fades again. Within a week it is invisible. And you go back to not seeing it at all, until the next person comes.

Which means your own house has a switch in it, and you do not hold the switch. Other people do, without knowing they are holding it, and they only come around every so often.

You are able to look at your own house on an ordinary Tuesday, and it has never once taken a visitor to make a room visible.

Seest thou this woman

There is a dinner where the host is thinking one thing, and Jesus turns to him and asks him a question about what is in the room.

And he turned to the woman, and said unto Simon, Seest thou this woman? I entered into thine house, thou gavest me no water for my feet. (Luke 7:44, King James Version)

Seest thou this woman.

Simon had been looking at her for some time. He had formed an opinion. What he had not done was see her, and the question is not a rebuke about kindness, it is a question about sight.

And notice how the seeing gets taught. Jesus does not describe her feelings. He walks Simon through the physical facts of his own house: no water, no kiss, no oil. Ordinary items in a familiar room that the owner of the room had stopped noticing.

You are being invited to look at the actual items in a familiar room, and seeing a thing plainly has never once been the same as being judged for it. Luke 7:44 turns the whole question toward the house and its ordinary objects, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that look a mercy rather than an inspection.

And here is the part worth sitting with. Simon needed somebody else to ask before he could see what was in his own dining room.

That is not a special weakness in Simon. It is how houses work. The eye stops reporting on what never changes, because an eye that reported everything all the time would be useless.

You were built with eyes that stop reporting the unchanging, and a room you no longer notice is a fact about vision rather than a fact about you. The Spirit of God is the one who knows exactly how a person is made, and Luke 7:44 asks the question gently and asks it about a house.

The visitor is not the problem and not the solution

So here is where it goes wrong, and it is worth naming carefully.

The visit becomes the only time the room is visible, and because a visit carries an audience, the seeing arrives already fused to embarrassment. Sight and shame come through the door together, holding hands, and after that nobody can tell them apart.

Which is why the two days after a visit are the worst two days, and why nothing ever gets done in them. Shame is a terrible foreman. It produces a frantic evening and then a fortnight of nothing.

You have been given sight in the worst possible packaging, and the shame that arrived with it was never once part of the seeing. Luke 7:44 separates the two completely, because Jesus asks Simon to look and never once tells him what kind of man he is, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can hand a person a clear view with nothing attached.

And there is a second cost, quieter than the first.

Because the only reliable way to see your house is to have somebody in it, and having somebody in it is now expensive, the invitations thin out. Not deliberately. They just become slightly harder to issue, and then slightly harder again.

You are not required to buy your own eyesight with an audience, and there has never once been a rule that a room only counts when somebody else is standing in it. The Spirit of God is the one who is in a house on the days when nobody visits, and Luke 7:44 puts the whole conversation inside an ordinary room with ordinary things in it.

Borrow the eyes on purpose

Here is the practical part and it is a trick, and the fact that it is a trick does not make it less real.

Walk out of your own front door. Close it behind you. Stand there for ten seconds and think about something else entirely, the car, the weather, what is for dinner.

Then walk back in as though you had never been in this house before.

You have a front door that works in both directions, and coming through it as a stranger has never once required a stranger to be present. Luke 7:44 teaches sight by walking a man through the items in his own house, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is in the hall with you while you do a slightly absurd thing on purpose.

And then stop at the first thing your eye lands on. Not the worst thing. The first thing.

That is the borrowed look, and you just took it yourself, and there was nobody standing in your hallway being nice about it.