I clean up before the cleaners come.
I know how that sounds. But there it is. Two nice ladies show up every couple of weeks to do a job I’m grateful someone else will do, and every time—without fail—I spend the hour before they arrive picking up, straightening, making the place look less like what it actually is. I don’t want them to think I’m a slob.
They’re there to clean my house. And I hide the mess before they arrive.
I thought about that when I tried to understand why I hesitated at the door.
The door I saw while praying.
My front door.
I wasn’t locked out. I wasn’t standing in the cold, trying to find my way in. I was inside—at least that’s what it looked like as I prayed—going about whatever it is I go about, when I became aware of someone waiting on the other side of the front door.
Not knocking. Just there. Forever patient, waiting for me to decide.
I knew who it was before I reached the handle.
So I opened it. That part came quickly because I wanted to open the door. I wanted to see Him standing there. And He was. The Lord. Waiting with the particular patience of someone who has been waiting a long time and made peace with it.
I propped the door open with my arm and stood in the center of the threshold.
Not to hold Him at bay. No, that’s not what it was. I wanted the door open. I wanted to talk to Him, to be near Him, to have Him close. But I didn’t immediately say come in.
I’ve been sitting with that ever since. Trying to be honest about why I didn’t rush Him inside.
And what I came back to was the cleaning ladies.
My house was a mess.
Not disaster—not filth, not really—but lived-in. The kind of mess that accumulates when life refuses to stay organized. Pots and dishes in the sink. Laundry that had been clean for three days and was now just a pile on a chair that I kept meaning to fold. Mail on the counter. A messy bed. The particular disorder of a man who is mostly functional and occasionally overwhelmed.
He could see all of it from the doorway.
And I knew He saw.
That was the thing I couldn’t get past. He was standing right there. And the light coming in from behind Him was reaching into the corners of every room.
I know this doesn’t make theological sense. The Lord already knows every room. He’s seen every corner of the place long before I opened the door. My hesitation wasn’t protecting Him from something He didn’t know. It was protecting me from something I wasn’t ready to face.
Being fully seen.
I wanted to say: just give me a minute. Let me straighten up. Then come in.
He didn’t give me the chance, and pointed to my arm holding open the door.
Wouldn’t it be better if something else kept the door open?
He gestured to the floor.
That’s when I looked down and saw a door stopper. A cheap one at first: thin, brittle wood that wouldn’t hold against much. Then it thickened. Oak. Then bronze, catching the light through the doorway. Then iron, replaced by steel. Something serious.
The door stopper is your faith, He told me. Strengthened by My grace. The stronger your faith, the stronger the stopper.
I understood that. My faith has done exactly that—hardened, then corroded, then hardened again. I know what feeds it, and I know what starves it.
But then He shifted the frame entirely. But what if the door wasn’t there at all? He asked. He pointed to the jamb then to the screws.
What if you removed those, and there was no door?
I looked at them, those screws embedded deep into the frame. Then at my empty hands.
“How, Lord? I don’t have a screwdriver.”
A beat.
Then use your fingernails.
He wasn’t being cruel. He wasn’t pretending it wouldn’t cost something to take a door off its hinges with your bare hands, bleeding your fingertips down to nothing on hardware that doesn’t want to move.
He was saying: the tools don’t have to be elegant. Willingness is its own instrument. No matter how long it takes. This is a task you must begin.
After sitting with this long enough, I heard Him say:
You don’t need to clean up first. That’s not how this works. I didn’t come for the clean house.
We spend so much energy fortifying the door stopper. Strengthening faith so we can hold the door open wider, keep it from swinging shut, maintain the gap. And that matters. But the better prayer, the harder, more honest prayer is: “Lord, help me remove the door.”
Not because I’ve finally gotten the place in order. Because I’ve stopped pretending that’s the condition.
He came inside anyway. I don’t remember the exact moment. That’s how grace works sometimes; you’re on one side of a threshold alone, and then you’re not.
He sat at my table. A golden aura surrounded Him, soft at the edges, like the inside of a soap bubble held completely still. He had this kind of peace that doesn’t announce itself. It simply is.
Because I was nearby, His aura reached me too.
I didn’t deserve that. But there it was.
And then—I can’t tell you exactly why—I turned my gaze away from Him, back toward the door.
It was still wide open. But outside, a maelstrom raged. Wind tore at the trees. Rain came sideways. A small river formed at the threshold, water creeping over the sill and across the floor, filled with debris of all shapes and sizes.
The storm carried in everything I’d been dreading. Adding to the mess already present.
I turned back to Him.
“Should I close the door?”
Why?
I gestured at the floor. The spreading water. The garbage settling in the corners. None of it touching him or me while I was inside His aura.
Still, I said, “This—this ‘stuff’ is coming inside.”
He shook His head. Once. Slowly.
And when He sighed, I heard the disappointment. Not anger. This was the disappointment of someone who loves you and thought you’d understood by now.
You have Me—He paused—your Lord Jesus Christ, sitting at your table. And you’re worried about some water and garbage.
Then I was shown something else.
Another home. A long time ago. In Bethany.
Two sisters. One sat at the feet of Jesus. She was just present, content to be near Him and let that be enough.
The other sister was in the kitchen, doing everything that needed doing. Quietly furious that she was the only one who seemed to understand that guests required effort and someone had to keep the place from falling apart.
Martha didn’t have bad intentions. I want to be fair to Martha, because I am Martha, who was convinced that the right way to honor the Lord’s presence was to make everything presentable first. To clean before the cleaner comes.
“Mary has chosen the better part,” Jesus told her. “And it will not be taken from her.”
The better part wasn’t laziness or ignoring what needed doing. Rather, it was understanding what needed doing most. It was sitting down in a messy house with the Lord at the table and letting that be enough. It was resisting the urge to manage the impression.
It was leaving the door off its hinges and letting Him enter and see every room.
The door is still open.
I haven’t closed it. I don’t think I’m supposed to. Because the storm isn’t the problem. Neither is the mess. The problem was never the condition of the interior of my house.
It was the belief that I had to fix the condition before I could let Him in.
The screws are still in the jamb. I’m working on them too. Slowly, with my fingernails and a willingness to bleed a little.
It turns out that’s enough to start.
Photo by Josue Michel on Unsplash
