My Fathers Cabinet in the Front Room

It is dark wood with a glass front and it has been in that corner since before Faisal was born, and there are two things in it that have not been opened in fifteen years and one that gets opened when somebody visits.

It is his father's house. Faisal moved back in three years ago when his mother's health turned, and he is thirty six and he sleeps in the room he slept in as a boy, and he is not complaining about any of it because his father is seventy nine and there is nowhere else he would rather be.

The front room is where everybody sits. It is not a room you can avoid. It is the room with the good chairs and the low table and the television, and the cabinet stands in the corner of it with the lamp on top, and every guest who has ever come to that house has been offered something out of it, because that is what the cabinet is for and has always been for.

His father does not know. Faisal has never told him. He is not going to tell him, and that is a settled decision and not a fearful one: his father is seventy nine, this is his house, that cabinet was his father's, and there is no version of that conversation that does not take something away from an old man in the last part of his life.

So Faisal walks past it eleven or twelve times a day and pours tea for visitors from a pot on the low table.

You know that piece of furniture. It might be a cabinet, a fridge, a cupboard in a house you do not own. It has been there longer than you have been sober, and it belongs to somebody you love, and asking is not on the table.

You are given the walking as your part, and you were never handed the furniture as your responsibility. The psalm says I will walk within my house with a perfect heart, and the verb is about how a person moves rather than about what is in the room; that is exactly what stands written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a real distinction for a man crossing a front room twelve times a day.

I will walk within my house

Let me be careful about what this article will and will not do, because this is a house with an old man in it.

It is not going to tell you to ask him to move it. You have weighed that and you have decided, and your reasons are good ones, and a page written by somebody who has never met your father has no business overturning them. It is also not going to tell you that you must keep quiet forever, because circumstances change and so do people. What it will not do is hand you an instruction about somebody else's house.

Here is the verse, and I want you to see how much of it is about the man and how little of it is about the building.

I will behave myself wisely in a perfect way. O when wilt thou come unto me? I will walk within my house with a perfect heart.Psalm 101:2

Three clauses. Two of them are about how David will conduct himself, and the middle one is a question thrown up to God in the middle of the sentence.

I will walk within my house. Walk is a movement word and it is the ordinary Hebrew word for how a person conducts their life. And within my house locates it: not in public, not at the gate where everybody is watching, not in the palace throne room. Indoors, where nobody is.

You have your conduct located exactly where nobody is watching, and you were never being scored in public. That is what stands written in Psalm 101, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that specific to a man crossing a front room in his father's house.

And with a perfect heart. The word behind perfect means whole, undivided, all of a piece. It is not a claim to flawlessness; it is a claim to integrity in the old sense, meaning that a man is the same thing all the way through and in every room.

You are being asked for wholeness rather than flawlessness, and you were never being measured against a standard nobody keeps. Scripture asks for an undivided heart, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a possible thing rather than a crushing one at thirty six.

Now the middle clause, which almost everybody skips because it looks like it does not belong. O when wilt thou come unto me? Right in the middle of two statements of intent, David interrupts himself to ask God when He is coming. It is not a tidy verse. He commits, and then in the same breath admits that he cannot do any of this alone and wants to know when the help arrives.

You are permitted to ask for the help in the middle of the commitment, and you were never expected to make the promise and then manage it by yourself. The written word keeps that question in the middle of the sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it an honest part of a man's resolve rather than a crack in it.

And here is what I want to say about that cabinet. It is not your enemy and it is not your test. It is a piece of your father's furniture, older than you, and it is going to be there. What the psalm gives you is not power over the corner of a room. It gives you the walking: the way you cross that room, twelve times a day, whole, with your heart in one piece, pouring tea from a pot on a low table.

And the plain thing, which is said in every article on this site. Living in a house where you cannot say the thing is heavy, and it is worth telling somebody outside the house. A friend, a counselor, your doctor, a room where people say true things out loud. That is God's kindness with a face on it, and it takes nothing at all away from your father.