You Do Not Have to Knock

The third nail from the left still stands proud of the porch board, and Ruby steps over it without looking, the way she has stepped over it since she was six years old.

Then she knocks. Three times, not hard, the way a person knocks at a house that belongs to somebody else. And then she takes a half step back off the sill, to give whoever is inside room to swing the door open.

Nobody is inside. Nobody has been inside since the flowers went brown on the porch rail in March. Ruby knows that better than anybody alive, because she is the one who drained the pipes and shut the flue and turned the key in the lock and put the key in her coat.

It is still in her coat. Right hand pocket, on a loop of string, with a paper tag her aunt wrote on in pencil. The lawyer read the will out in a room with a radiator that ticked, and the home place went to Ruby outright: the house, the forty acres behind it, the barn with the swallows in the rafters. Nobody contested it. There was nobody left to contest it but her.

And every Tuesday since, she has driven out, parked at the end of the lane so as not to cut ruts in the grass, walked up, and knocked.

She could not tell you why. She has tried to tell herself why, out loud, in the truck. She has said it seems disrespectful to just walk in on a house. She has said the place needs asking. Neither of those is the reason, and she knows it, because when she says them her chest does not loosen even a little.

The reason is older and plainer. For thirty years this was somebody else's house and she was somebody who came to it. She wiped her boots on that mat. She waited on that sill in the rain more times than she could count while her aunt came through from the back with her hands wet, calling that she was coming, hold on, she was coming. Waiting on the boards is not a decision Ruby is making this morning. It is the shape her body learned, and her body has not yet been told the shape changed.

So she stands. The paint on the door is the same green it was when she was small and the same green it was when the will was read. A wren goes up into the eaves and comes back out. Somewhere behind the house a gate she owns swings on a hinge she owns. She raises her hand and knocks again, three times, not hard, at a door that has been hers since November.

You are the one on the porch. I do not know the name of your house and I am not going to guess at what happened on that sill, because it is not mine to guess and this message is not about it. But I know the sound of a person knocking at a door that opened a long time ago. So I have come up the steps to stand beside you and say the plain thing I can see from here: the hand you are knocking with, and the pocket the key is in, belong to the same woman.

Somebody Else Opened It

Let me name the weight before I lift a finger toward it, because it has been carried a long time and nobody has ever named it back to you.

It is not the waiting. Waiting is nothing. People wait for buses. It is the arithmetic underneath the waiting: that a person like you gets into a place like that on somebody's good will, and good will can be withdrawn, so you had better keep knocking so that nobody can ever say you presumed. That is a decent instinct pointed at the wrong door. It made you careful in a house where care was needed. It is still running, and the house it is running in now is your own.

So here is the first thing, and I want you to hear where it comes from, because it did not come from me.

Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, By a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh;Hebrews 10:19-20

Read what that does not say. It does not say we may hope to be admitted. It does not say word will be sent out when the room is ready. It says boldness, and it says by the blood of Jesus, which means the entering was paid and consecrated by Somebody who was not you. You have the right of entry into the holiest place there is, and it was not handed over on a good day and cannot be taken back on a bad one. That is not my ruling. It is God's, set down in Hebrews 10, and the same Spirit who put those words on the page is the one bringing them onto the boards you are standing on.

There was a curtain in the temple as thick as a man's hand, and the whole nation understood what it was saying. This far and no further. Once a year. One man. Never without blood. Then a carpenter died on a hill outside the city wall and the curtain came apart.

And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent;Matthew 27:51

From the top. That is the detail I would hate for you to walk past. Nobody reached up and tore it. It opened from a height no hand could reach, downward, which is the direction every good thing in this house comes from. The way in was opened over your head and before your time, and it is already finished in you. Hear where I get that from: Hebrews 10 calls it a new and living way, already consecrated, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns a written sentence into a floor you can put your weight on.

Knocking Is Not Good Manners Here

Now the second thing, and this one costs something to hear.

The knocking is not respect. I know it wears the coat of respect, and I am not going to shame a woman who was taught to wait on a sill in the rain, because she learned something true about honoring a house. But a knock asks a question, and the question a knock asks is: am I allowed. Ask that at your own door often enough and your own hand starts to believe the answer is still in doubt.

Scripture settles that standing in a word that has nothing to do with permission.

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

Household. Not guest list. A guest is admitted. A member of a household comes through and puts the kettle on and nobody in the room turns around to see who it is. You are of the household of God, and the word for that in the house is not visitor, it is family. Nobody has to take it from me. Ephesians 2 puts it in writing, and the Holy Spirit is the witness to it inside you, which is why a sentence like that lands somewhere behind the ribs and not only in the ears.

There is something else about the knock that I have watched in myself and might as well say out loud. It is not only asking. It is also delaying. As long as a woman is on the sill she has not yet found out what the house is like now that it is hers, and the sill is a known quantity and the kitchen is not. A person can stand a long while in the gap between a legal fact and a lived one, and nobody out on the road will ever call it out, because from the road it looks like manners.

Right now, as you read this, the standing you keep asking for has already been given, and the asking is the only thing left between your hand and the handle. His word keeps no separate register for people who came in late, and His Spirit is not running a quieter policy behind it.