The Hall Was Always Just A Hall

The smell of the hall.

Old carpet and cold coats and whatever the radiator does to dust, and underneath all of that a faint sweetness from the cupboard under the stairs where the shoe polish has been since her father's time. It is the smell of home. It has been the smell of home for nineteen years and there is nothing wrong with it.

And it is the thing that starts it.

She gets the key in, and the door goes over the mat the way it always has, and she is not even fully inside, one bag still on her shoulder, and it arrives. A weight, on the chest and the shoulders, arriving faster than thought, before the light is on, before she has put the milk down.

Since March. Something happened in March, in this house, and it is over now, and everybody has moved on including her, and the hall did not get the message.

She has tried the sensible things. She has come home later. She has come home earlier. She has left every light on before going out so the house is bright when she gets back, and she has come in through the back for a two weeks, which worked for about four days.

What she has not told anyone, because there is no way to say it that does not sound like something, is that she has begun to dread five o'clock from about two.

And the worst of it is not the weight. It is that the weight has taken her hall. It is her hall. It has her father's shoe polish in it.

Now hear me before we go on, because I want the ground clear.

You are not imagining it, and you are not being dramatic, and there is nothing wrong with your faith. Places hold things. A body remembers a room. What you are describing has happened to a great many people who love God very much, and I have never once heard God treat it as a fault.

The ground has already changed hands

I am going to give you one sentence, and there is no technique attached to it and there is nothing you have to do correctly.

He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son.Colossians 1:13

Two verbs, both finished, and neither of them yours.

Delivered. Transferred. Not "is helping you to move", not "will relocate you if you can hold your nerve at the front door". It is written as a thing already done, in the past, by Someone else, about you.

And look at the second word especially, because transferred is a legal word before it is a spiritual one. It is what happens to a title deed. It is the language of an address changing owner. One authority had it, and now another one does, and the change was made above the head of everybody standing in the hall.

That is what I want under your feet this evening. Not a stronger feeling. A fact about who holds the ground. And it is not a fact I thought up for you: it is written down in Colossians 1, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a written deed into a hallway at half past six and makes it weigh something.

Because here is what has been happening in your hallway since March, and it is much less dramatic than you fear and much more ordinary than you have let yourself believe.

Something is trading on an old claim.

Not a claim it has. A claim it is behaving as though it has, on ground that has already changed owner, in a house belonging to a woman who belongs to Christ. The heaviness that meets you at the door is not a landlord. It has never been the landlord. It has been standing in a hall it does not own, acting like it does, and getting away with it because nobody has said anything out loud.

Now hear what I am not saying, because this is where messages like this go badly wrong.

I am not going to describe anything to you. There is no lurid picture in this message and there is not going to be one, because a frightened person does not need a more detailed fear, and God has never once made someone more afraid in order to make them free. What you get here instead is the written word, said plainly, with His Spirit standing in the room while you hear it.

I am not handing you a procedure. There is no correct wording, no order of operations, nothing that fails if you do it wrong at the wrong moment or forget a step. Words are not spells. If any of this starts to feel like a technique you have to get right, you have wandered off the ground this article stands on, and the ground is that the transfer was made by Christ and is not maintained by your performance.

And nothing here touches your care. If you are seeing someone about this, keep seeing them. If you take something for your sleep or your nerves, keep taking it, exactly as you have been told to, and never adjust it because of anything you read anywhere. That help is not a lack of trust and it never was; it is provision, and God is entirely in it.

Now let me name the pit, because it is not really the hall. I name it with Scripture in my hand and the Holy Spirit doing the work, never with a method of my own.

The lonely part is that it followed you home. You can be brave in the world. You have been brave in the world all year. Home is the one place a person is supposed to be able to stop bracing, and yours has stopped being that, so there is now nowhere in your life where you fully put the bag down. That is exhausting in a way that people who have not lived it do not understand, and you have been living it since March without saying a word.