Within My House With A Perfect Heart

Nothing has happened.

That is the strange thing about it and that is why it has been so hard to bring to anybody. There has been no incident. Nobody has asked anything of them. They have not been present for a single conversation that would trouble a reasonable person.

And yet for about seven months they have carried a low grade sense of being implicated in something.

It is not paranoia and it is not conviction. It sits somewhere between. A feeling of being adjacent, of standing near, of having a coat on the same hook as something they cannot see.

They have tested it. They have gone through their own conduct carefully, more than once, at the sort of hour when this kind of test gets done, and they have not found anything. Which they do not entirely trust, because a person who has become used to something is exactly the person who would not find it.

So the circle. Nothing found, no confidence in the finding, and the same weight next week.

And there is a hardening happening underneath, which is that they are becoming suspicious of the atmosphere, and suspicion of an atmosphere is a corrosive thing to carry into a canteen at lunchtime every day.

You may know that hook. No specific charge. A general sense of being tangled in something, and no way to test it that you would believe.

The house you actually keep

Here is a line from a psalm that is entirely about a person's own conduct, and the picture in it is a house.

I will behave myself wisely in a perfect way. O when wilt thou come unto me? I will walk within my house with a perfect heart.Psalm 101:2

Within my house. That is a boundary and it is drawn on purpose.

He is talking about his own conduct, in his own domain, over the things actually under his hand. And then the psalm goes on to list what he will and will not set before his own eyes, what he will not allow in his own doing.

He does not attempt an inventory of the kingdom. He keeps his house.

You are keeping a house, and the walls of it are what is actually under your hand today. Psalm 101:2 puts the whole matter inside a man's own house, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a conscience be thorough about its own ground instead of anxious about the whole street.

Now let me name the difference you have been unable to name for seven months.

A conscience is specific. It says a thing. It points to an act, an omission, a word, and it does not go away when you look at it directly, and it can be repented of and put down.

Atmosphere is not specific. It is a mood you have been breathing, and it produces exactly what you describe: no charge, no evidence, no relief, and a slowly spreading suspicion of everything around you. It cannot be repented of because there is nothing to name, which is precisely why it never resolves.

You are able to tell the two apart, and the difference is whether it can name a thing. The written word keeps the whole question inside a man's own house, and the Holy Spirit convicts about something rather than leaving a person under a fog.

And I want to say plainly what this is not. This is not an instruction to stop caring about anything beyond yourself. Some things beyond you are genuinely wrong and God deals with all of them, and there are proper ways to raise a real concern with somebody wise who can see your whole situation. If you have a specific thing, it is specific, and you should treat it that way.

But a fog is not a finding, and seven months of a fog is not evidence of anything except that you have been breathing it.

The honest half is that the atmosphere may not change, and you cannot make it change, and being in it may go on costing you something. That is real. What ends is the idea that you are guilty of it.

And there is a part only you can do. The walls have to be named. Out loud. The actual list of things under your hand today, so that the house has an edge again and the fog is on the outside of it.