It Has Been Broken So Long I Stopped Noticing

There is a handle in your house you turn a particular way.

You do not think about it. You have not thought about it in years. You just know that it needs lifting slightly, or pulling toward you first, and your hand does that on its own now without asking you.

There is a door that does not sit right, and you have a way of closing it. There is a tap you turn further than you should. There is a drawer with a technique.

None of that is in your mind as a list of broken things. It has moved somewhere else. It has become how your house works, and your body knows all of it, and the knowing has quietly cost you something for a long time.

I want to be careful with how I say the next bit, because there is a version of this conversation that is unkind and you have probably heard it.

This is not laziness. You have not been ignoring your house. What happened is much more ordinary and much more human than that: a thing broke at a time when you had nothing spare, and you worked around it, and the working around succeeded. It solved the problem well enough that the problem stopped presenting itself. And then that happened eleven more times over some years.

Numbness is not a character fault. It is what a person does when the list is longer than the week.

I went out by night and viewed the walls

There is a passage where a man arrives at a ruined city, and the first thing he does is not what you would expect.

And I went out by night by the gate of the valley, even before the dragon well, and to the dung port, and viewed the walls of Jerusalem, which were broken down, and the gates thereof were consumed with fire. (Nehemiah 2:13, King James Version)

And viewed the walls.

He did not begin by organizing anybody. He did not begin by carrying a stone. He went out at night, on his own, with almost nobody knowing, and he went and looked at it.

And notice he goes to the worst parts. The valley gate, the dung port. He does not tour the presentable side. He goes and sees the whole of it, deliberately, including the parts that are humiliating to look at.

That looking is treated in the text as the first real work. Everything else in that book comes after it, and none of it would have been possible without a man who was willing to go and see exactly how bad it was without flinching and without despairing.

You are able to look straight at the state of it, and that looking has never once been the same as being condemned by it. Nehemiah 2:13 makes viewing the broken walls the first act of the rebuild rather than a judgment on anybody, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person see clearly without the seeing crushing them.

Seeing is not the same as owing

Here is the fear underneath, and it is the reason you have not made this list already.

You are afraid that if you look properly, you will owe the whole thing.

That if you write down what is actually wrong in this house, you will be holding a document of your own failure, and every item on it will become a debt with your name on it, and the list will be too long, and you will feel worse on Tuesday than you do now.

So the numbness has been doing a job. It has been protecting you from a bill you cannot pay.

But seeing something is not agreeing to fix it. Nehemiah looked at the whole wall in one night. He did not rebuild it that night, and looking at all of it did not oblige him to. You can know that a drawer is broken and choose to leave it broken for another year, and the knowing is still better than the not knowing, because now it is a decision instead of a fog.

You are allowed to see it all and fix almost none of it, and looking has never once put you in debt for what you saw. The written word has a man survey the whole ruin before a single stone moves, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates seeing a thing from owing it.

One room, three smallest things

So here is the assignment, and I have made it deliberately tiny.

Walk one room. Write down the three smallest broken things.

Not the whole house. One room, the one you are nearest. And not the big thing, not the thing that needs a trade, not the one you already know about. The three smallest. The catch. The handle. The bit of trim that came away. The kind of thing you have been stepping around so long that you will have to look properly to find it.

It takes four minutes and it needs a pen and nothing else.

And I want to say clearly what this is not. It is not the beginning of a project. You are not committing to any of the three. You are finding out what your own eyes have been filtering out, and that is the entire task for tonight.

Nehemiah 2:13 has a man go and view the walls before anybody lifts anything, and the Holy Spirit is the one who steadies a person walking their own rooms with a pen.

You are able to walk one room and write three lines, and it has never once committed you to a single repair. Nehemiah 2:13 puts the survey before the work and treats it as work in itself, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody looking properly for the first time in years.