The Smile That Arrives Before She Does

A hundred people a week, near enough, and she knows most of them by name and the rest by face.

She is not on a rota. She was, years ago, and then it became simply what she does, which is stand near that door from twenty past until the singing starts and say hello to everybody who comes through it.

She is genuinely good at it. It is not a performance. She notices who came alone. She notices who has not been for a fortnight and says so without making it a thing. There are people in that building who first stayed because of ninety seconds at a door.

Here is what she caught herself at, three Sundays ago.

A woman came in, one of the regulars, nothing unusual, and she felt her own face do the thing. The lift, the warmth, the whole apparatus.

And she noticed that the face had gone first.

Half a second, maybe less. Not a lie. The warmth arrived. It just arrived a moment behind the smile, like something coming up the stairs after the door has already been opened.

She has been aware of it ever since and she does not like it at all.

Nothing has happened. She is not tired of those people. She would tell you plainly that she loves that door and would be lost without it.

But there is now a small gap in her that she can feel, between the thing she does and the thing she means, and she has not mentioned it to a single person, because how do you say it without sounding as though you are accusing yourself of something.

If you have felt a gap like that, come and stand by the glass a minute. Nobody is going to ask you to look inside yourself.

Guarding a heart is protecting a spring, not inspecting a self

There is a verse that everybody knows and nearly everybody hears as homework.

Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.Proverbs 4:23

Most people picture somebody walking round inside themselves with a clipboard looking for faults, and then they feel tired, and then nothing happens, because who has the energy for that on a Sunday.

But the word behind keep is a guarding word, the sort you use about something valuable, and the picture in the second half is not an inspection at all. It is a spring. Water coming up out of the ground. The thing being guarded is a source, and you guard a source because everything downstream comes from it.

Nobody stands over a spring with a clipboard. You keep the leaves out and you do not let anybody build on top of it. That is the entire job.

You are not being asked to audit yourself, and you never were. Proverbs 4:23 hands you a spring to protect rather than a self to interrogate, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the protecting from the inside, which is why years of that door have never once required a self examination to stay real.

A gap is not a verdict

Now the second thing, and it matters because a woman standing by glass doors is quick to convict herself.

A half second between the face and the feeling is not evidence that you have become false. It is far more often evidence that a thing has been done a very great number of times.

That is how bodies work. A hand that has done the same movement ten thousand times begins to do it slightly ahead of the decision to do it, and nobody reads that as insincerity in a pianist. Something similar happens to warmth that has been given at a door for years, and Scripture treats the inside of a person as something God attends to rather than something a person is tried for.

Ezekiel has God saying I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit within you. Every verb is His, and the promise is not addressed to people who have failed.

You have a God who takes the inside of you as His own responsibility, and He deals with it as a gift. Ezekiel 36:26 puts the whole transaction in God's hands, and the next verse names His Spirit put within you as the one who does it, which means the gap you have felt is a thing He tends rather than a charge He files.

So we are not going in there today. There is no inventory coming and no working out when the gap opened. This site does not hand anybody a self audit.

You are going to hand one thing over, and that is all.

You have somewhere to put this, and you are allowed to put it there this morning. 1 Peter 5:7 says to cast your anxiety on Him because He cares for you, and it is His Spirit who makes that an actual transaction rather than a sentiment, so the gap you noticed has an address and it is not your own chest.

And under all of it: God is the one keeping your heart while you keep watch over it. You have not been standing guard over yourself alone by a set of glass doors.