An Hour No Guest Has a Claim On

Go through your week and try to find one hour that a visitor could not reasonably be given.

Not an hour you would defend. An hour where the answer would obviously be no, where anybody who knew you would agree that of course you could not, where there would be nothing to explain.

If your door is genuinely open, there is no such hour anywhere in the week, and you have probably never noticed that, because it happened the same way an open door always happens. One person at a time, over years, every one of them welcome.

That is not a fault. I want to say that carefully and early, because I come from a place where the open door is the whole of a person's honor and I am not about to speak against it here.

The table is right. The bread going round is right. The neighbor who comes at nine because he saw the lamp on is right, and so is the cousin who stays four days, and so is the person nobody else has room for.

But there is something a fully open door does to a person, and it is not what people expect. It does not exhaust them. Hospitality feeds a host and everybody who does it knows that.

What it does is remove the category. Not the hour. The category. After enough years there is no such thing in your mind as time that is not, in principle, available, and a person cannot take an hour they do not believe exists.

He withdrew himself

There is a short line about the Lord in Luke that has always stopped me, because of what is around it.

And he withdrew himself into the wilderness, and prayed. (Luke 5:16, King James Version)

Read the sentence before it in that chapter and you find great multitudes coming together to hear and to be healed. Not one person waiting. Multitudes, with genuine need, and the whole point of His being there.

And He withdrew.

The verb matters. He did not finish and leave. He did not run out of people. Luke uses a word about deliberate removal, and the tense of it in that chapter suggests something that happened repeatedly rather than once.

Nobody would have said the multitudes were unimportant. Nobody would have said the timing was convenient. The withdrawing happened anyway, on purpose, more than once.

You are looking at a withdrawal that had every reason not to happen, and it has never once been in tension with loving the people at the door. Luke 5:16 records Him removing Himself while multitudes were still coming, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a hospitable person read that as permission rather than as a rebuke to their table.

The category, not the hour

Now let me get at the actual difficulty, because it is not scheduling and treating it as scheduling is why nothing has changed.

The problem is not that the hour is full. Hours can be moved, and a hundred of them have been moved already.

The problem is that there is no protected class of time in your head. Every hour is, in principle, giveable, and once every hour is giveable then any hour kept back is an hour taken from somebody, and taking is not a thing this house has ever been willing to do.

That is why the honest attempts have failed. A person who tries to keep an hour without a category simply feels like a person being selfish for sixty minutes, and nobody sustains that.

So the thing that has to change first is not the calendar. It is the existence of a kind of time that was never on offer.

You are permitted to have a kind of time that was not on the table, and that has never once meant your door is now closed. Luke 5:16 gives a withdrawal a place inside a life of constant availability. The Spirit of God is the one who makes room in a person's thinking before He makes room in their week.

And here is the thing I most want a hospitable person to hear. The withdrawing in that verse is not opposed to the multitudes. It is what He came back from. Every account of Him going out to a solitary place is followed by Him back among people, teaching, healing, feeding.

You are not choosing between your door and your hour, and no host has ever had to close one to have the other. The written word puts the withdrawal inside a ministry defined by crowds rather than outside it, and His Spirit is entirely able to hold both without embarrassment.

Decide the sentence before the hour

Now the practical part, and there are two halves and the second is the one nobody does.

First, pick one hour this week. Any hour. It does not have to be a good one and it should not be the best one, because the best one has a person attached to it already.

Second, and this is the whole thing: decide now what you will say if somebody asks for it.

Not a policy. One sentence. Something ordinary and short and completely unremarkable, decided in advance while sitting still, so that it does not have to be composed at a door by a person who is bad at saying no and who loves whoever is standing there.

Something like: I am not free then, but come at seven.

That is it. Notice it is not a refusal of the person. It moves them. Hospitality is entirely intact and the hour survives, and the reason it survives is that the sentence existed before the knock.

You are able to write one sentence in advance, and no host has ever been able to compose that sentence with somebody standing in the doorway. Luke 5:16 shows a deliberate removal rather than an improvised one. The same Spirit who recorded it is well able to make a short prepared sentence hold at a door.