Somebody Might Walk In

There is no lock on any door in that house except the bathroom, and she is not going to sit on a bathroom floor.

Four of them share it. Everybody is perfectly nice. Nobody has ever burst into anybody's room and nobody ever would, and none of that helps, because the problem is not that somebody will walk in. It is that somebody could.

So she sits on her bed with her Bible and reads two verses with one ear on the landing, and when a floorboard goes she puts it face down on the duvet without deciding to.

She got as far as praying out loud once, very quietly, in the kitchen at half twelve at night, and got about a sentence in when the boiler fired and she stopped and made a cup of tea she did not want.

And what has grown out of this over a year is a horrible little suspicion: that anything she does that could be observed is therefore performance. That the only real prayer is unobservable prayer, and she does not have anywhere unobservable, and so all of it is slightly fake.

That is your landing. That is your half twelve. And I want to answer that directly, because the verse everybody quotes at you about this does not say what you think it says.

What the closet was

Jesus is dealing with people who pray in public specifically to be admired, and He gives the alternative.

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.Matthew 6:6

Thy closet.

The word is a storeroom. A pantry. In a first century house it was the small windowless room where you kept the oil and the grain, and it was not a prayer room, and most houses in that crowd had one and no more privacy than that.

Now read the clause that carries the whole thing: thy Father which seeth in secret.

The secret is not a description of your building. It is a description of His seeing. He is the One who sees what is hidden. That is a statement about God's eyesight, not a specification for your accommodation.

You have a Father whose seeing is the secret place. Not a locked room you must produce first. The written word puts the hiddenness in Him rather than in your walls, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a woman with one ear on the landing.

Now let me say something about the other three, because a year of this has quietly turned them into an audience.

They are not watching. They are three people making toast and going to work, and if one of them opened a door and found you praying she would say sorry and close it and think about it for four seconds and never again.

You have no audience in that house. The written word aims this at people who wanted to be seen, and wanting is the whole issue in the passage. The Holy Spirit knows the difference between performing and being visible, and He has never once confused you with a hypocrite.

And now the suspicion itself, which is the thing doing the damage.

Observable therefore fake. Test it anywhere else and it collapses: a nurse working while somebody watches is not performing nursing. The passage is about motive, and yours is so plainly not that, which is exactly why you have been miserable about it for a year.

You are not faking anything at that table. Thy Father which seeth in secret, and the secret is His, and it covers a kitchen at half twelve. The Holy Spirit was in that room when the boiler fired, and He did not think you were showing off.