Everything Gets All the Way In

Beto has nothing fixed in his life and for about four years it felt like freedom.

No set time for anything. He eats when he is hungry, which is sometimes eleven at night. He is on nobody's schedule. If someone wants to do something at short notice, he can, and people like that about him, and it has genuinely given him a life other people do not have. He has slept on floors in three countries because somebody asked him on a Tuesday.

He is twenty-nine now and he is tired in a way that sleep is not touching.

Here is what actually happens to him, and it took a while to see because it does not look like anything.

Everything gets all the way in.

A message at one in the morning gets read at one in the morning. A friend having a bad week reaches him fully, at whatever hour, in whatever state he is in, and he gives it everything he has because he is a good man and there is nothing between him and it.

An offer he does not want to take gets considered for ninety minutes, because there is no rule anywhere in his life that would have answered it for him.

A mood arrives at eight in the evening and takes the whole evening, because there is nothing on the other side of it. Nothing was going to happen at nine anyway.

He is not lazy and he is not selfish. It is nearly the reverse. He is completely available, at all times, to everything, and it is eating him.

He was at Marisol's in the spring, a whole houseful, plates everywhere.

And her little one, who is four, went off at about twenty past seven. Properly went off, over nothing, the way a tired four-year-old does.

And Marisol picked him up and took him out of the room and put him to bed, and by about twenty-five to eight it was over and the house went back to what it was doing.

And Beto said, out loud and as a joke, "I wish somebody would do that to me."

And it landed wrong. Not badly. It just landed differently than he meant it, in a quiet second, and about four people looked at him.

He has thought about it every week since.

Now let me ask you what got in last night.

Because if this is you, something reached you yesterday at full strength that had no business getting that far, and you took it at full strength, and you have been doing that for years and calling it being open.

A city with the walls down

There is a proverb that has been used as an insult for a long time and is not one.

Like a city that is broken into and without walls is a man who has no control over his spirit.Proverbs 25:28

Read it as the picture it is, because it is a picture and not a verdict.

An ancient city without walls is not a wicked city. It is not a lazy city. It is a city that anything can walk into. Traders, weather, an army, a rumor: whatever arrives, arrives all the way to the middle, at whatever speed it was traveling.

The walls were not there to keep the city in. Nobody built a wall to imprison their own people. They were there so that a city could decide what came in, and at what hour, and so that the people inside could sleep.

Control over his spirit in that verse is not about being cold or shut down. It is about having somewhere the noise stops.

So hear this said over you, in a front room with the plates still out. You were not built to take everything at full strength at every hour, and the tiredness in you is not a character weakness, it is a city with nothing round it. That is written into a proverb that is a picture and not an accusation, and it is the Holy Spirit who grows self-control as fruit in a person, and fruit is something grown in you rather than squeezed out of you.

Now let me be careful, because a proverb like that can be used to hit somebody and I have seen it done.

This is not a verse about a messy house.

It has nothing to say about whether your kitchen is tidy or whether you keep a diary or whether you are the sort of person who is late. Disorder is not a sin and I am not going to let this article turn into that, because that road ends with a person measuring their soul by their inbox.

And I am not going to tell you that your openness was wrong.

It was not. The three countries and the floors and the yes at short notice are some of the best things about you, and there are people whose worst month was survivable because you have no gate on you. I am not asking you to become somebody who checks their calendar before they answer a friend.

What I am saying is that a wall is not the opposite of hospitality. It is what makes hospitality repeatable.

A city with walls can open a gate. A city without walls cannot, because it has nothing to open, and everything that comes just comes, and after a few years of that the people inside are not generous, they are simply overrun.

That is where you are. Not selfish. Overrun.

And here is the part you have not looked at: you have no way to say no to anything, so you have never once said yes on purpose. Every yes you have given in four years was the absence of a barrier, not a decision. Some of them were wonderful. None of them were chosen.

The word says God gives to His beloved even in their sleep, which describes a person who is not required to be awake and available for their own life to keep going. And the Spirit of God is the one who produces self-control as fruit, which is worth hearing exactly: it is a fruit He grows, not a discipline you have to manufacture before He will come near you.

The tradition this site belongs to has always liked a boundary. A day with an edge on it. A time when the shop shuts. And people have laughed at that for a couple of centuries, and the argument about the details is not one I am settling here. But the instinct underneath it was never about restriction. It was that a person who never closes anything has nowhere to be a person.