Living Like a Guest in Your Own House

Tamsin has a key to that house and she still knocks.

Not a loud knock. A small one, with her hand already on the handle, done as she is opening the door, so that it is technically a knock and technically an entry at the same time. She has been doing it for three years. Nobody has ever asked her to.

There is a whole set of these and she can list them if she is honest.

She does not take the last of anything. She asks before she puts the kettle on, in a house where she has made tea four hundred times. She does not sit in the chair by the window, which is nobody's chair and never was, and which she used to sit in constantly.

And when somebody says stay for supper she says are you sure, every time, and they say yes, every time, and there has never once been an occasion in three years when the answer was anything else.

Here is the thing about all of that, and it is worth being precise, because a person doing this usually thinks they are being considerate.

None of it is politeness. Politeness is what you do in somebody else's house. This is a woman who was forgiven, and welcomed back, and told plainly and repeatedly that it was finished, and who has responded by moving into the guest position and staying there.

And nobody can get her out of it, because everything she is doing is small and gracious, and there is no way to object to a person being lovely.

The forgiveness landed. That is what makes this so odd from outside. She is not carrying guilt in any form she could describe. If you asked her whether she is forgiven she would say yes without hesitating.

She simply does not act like somebody who lives there.

And this is where I stop writing about Tamsin, because there is a place where you knock.

I am not going to ask what happened. That is yours and it stays yours.

Two things that stopped being true

I want to give you a verse that does its work in the first four words, and almost everybody reads past them to get to the warm part.

Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God.Ephesians 2:19

No more strangers and foreigners.

Two words and they are not synonyms. A stranger is somebody nobody knows. A foreigner is somebody known perfectly well who has no standing: present lawfully, welcome even, and not a member of the household. Rights not held. A seat at the table by invitation rather than by right.

Which of those two is your version. It is almost certainly the second, and Ephesians 2 says you are no more that, in the present tense, as an accomplished fact.

So take that where you actually stand with your hand on a door handle. You are no more a foreigner in that house, and Ephesians 2:19 says fellowcitizen and household, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that operational in a woman who has been knocking for three years.

And look at the two things it puts in place of the two it removes, because they are legal words and not warm ones.

Fellowcitizen is a status: rights held, standing equal, nothing provisional about it. Of the household is closer still: family, not staff, not a lodger, not a long term guest with excellent manners.

Neither of those is offered on probation. There is no clause about time served. The written word does not say ye shall become fellowcitizens when enough has passed, and the Spirit of God has not been running a period of assessment on you since it happened.