A Room With A Door That Shuts

There is nothing in your life at the moment with a door on it except the book.

Every room in the house is open. The phone is open. The situation you are in the middle of has no walls at all, and it is in the kitchen and the car and the four in the morning, and there is no version of the day where it is not in the room with you.

And then there is forty pages of a story, and for that stretch there is a door, and it shuts.

You have begun to wonder whether needing that is a bad sign. Whether a woman who has one closable room in her whole life is a woman in trouble.

Before anything else, one thing, because a person can arrive at a page about reading from anywhere. If what is happening has got heavier than a hard season, if you have been thinking about not being here at all, put this down and call or text 988 in the United States, or your own local crisis line wherever you are, today. This page cannot see you and is not qualified to. That call is.

Two things are also not coming here.

Nobody is handing you a list, and nobody is saying one word about your phone. You know about the phone. Everybody knows.

What I want to look at is the door, because Scripture has a place with a door on it and it is not described as a symptom.

He that dwelleth in the secret place

There is an opening to Psalm 91 that describes a location, and the words chosen for it are deliberately private.

He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. (Psalm 91:1, King James Version)

Read the two words in the middle. Secret place.

Not a public place. Not a place other people can see into. A secret place, and the psalm treats that quality as the whole point rather than as something regrettable.

And then the verb. Dwelleth. Not visits. Not retreats to occasionally when things are bad. Dwells, which is where somebody lives, and the psalm has a person living in a place nobody else can see into and calls that the right arrangement.

You are allowed a place with a door on it, and one closable room in a hard year has never once been a bad sign. Psalm 91:1 names a secret place and treats the privacy of it as the point rather than the problem, and the Holy Spirit is the one saying that over forty pages in an armchair.

There is a second half and it names what is actually happening in there.

Shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. A shadow requires something standing between a person and what is coming down, and that is a covering rather than an escape. Nothing has been fled from. Something is standing over.

You have a covering and not an escape hatch, and a closed door has never once been the same thing as running away. It is written shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty, the shadow is cast by somebody standing between rather than by a person hiding, and the Spirit of God is saying that plainly here.

One door is not a symptom, it is a scarcity

Here is the mechanism, and it is worth separating carefully.

Needing a door is not the concerning thing. Having only one is.

That distinction is the whole of it. A person with several closable rooms and one of them being a book is entirely ordinary. What has happened in your life is that the other doors came off: the friendships that got thin, the hour that used to be walking, the room that used to be a bath and a locked bathroom door.

So the book is not doing something unusual. It is doing the ordinary thing that a good closable room does, and it is doing it alone, and the aloneness is the fact rather than the fault.

You are looking at a scarcity of doors and not a dependence on one, and forty pages a night has never once been a symptom of anything. Psalm 91:1 has a person dwelling in a secret place as the settled arrangement, and the Holy Spirit is present with a woman who has begun auditing the one room that works.

And there is a second layer, and it is the one that has been quietly costing you.

The worry about the door has begun to get into the reading. There is a watching going on now, a checking of whether the enjoyment is too much for a woman in this situation, and that watching is a small door left ajar, and a door ajar is not a door.

Which means the vigilance has been taking exactly the thing it was worried about losing.

You have permission to shut the door completely, and forty pages with nothing watching has never once been a thing to be careful about. The written word puts a person living in a place nobody can see into and calls it dwelling, and His Spirit is the one who lets a door close all the way.

Fifteen minutes at a useful time

So here is the assignment, and the timing is chosen to add a second door rather than to police the first.

Read for fifteen minutes today at a time you would normally be doing something useful.

In the daylight, in the middle of things, in a slot that had a job in it. Not the forty pages at night, which are already yours and already being watched.

Fifteen minutes. Then stop.

Here is why a second door and not a smaller first one.

All of the worry here comes from the fact that there is one. And the fix for one door is not to be careful with it. The fix is a second door, and a second one is built by reading somewhere ordinary, in the daylight, where the whole thing is unremarkable.

Two closable rooms and the audit stops on its own, because a person with two of anything stops examining either one.

You are able to open a second door this afternoon, and fifteen minutes in the daylight has never once been in competition with the forty at night. Psalm 91:1 says he that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High, and the Holy Ghost is the one present with a woman reading in a bright room at three in the afternoon.

And nobody here is prescribing it. Reading is not going to carry you through what you are in and I will not pretend it will. It is a good thing, allowed in a hard year, and it does not have to work.

You have a good thing with no job to do, and a room with a door has never once had to justify itself as a coping mechanism. It is written shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty, the shadow is a covering and the dwelling is where somebody lives, and the Spirit of God is saying it in an armchair today.