Do Pop By: the Boundaries of a Sane Life

After my tantrum of yesterday about how tired I am of the news and the internet, I went ahead and read it all anyway After, I swear, AFTER I did all my work. It wasn’t totally fruitless. I came across this article from the dark ages of 2012 about how critical Hospitality is, and how important it is for people to feel free to invite themselves into your home, how the very gospel depends upon it. And gosh, I read the whole thing and thought, to quote myself, “yes” “yes” and “yes”, to all three reasons. Your house is not your own, your time is not your own, and your home is not your own. Amen. Not arguing, for once, at all….except….well…

Last week Matt sent this email out to the church.

“Anne is beginning the new homeschooling year this week. Because she has six very rowdy students all doing very different things scholastically, students who are extremely easily distracted, I’d like to ask that you refrain from calling her or dropping by the house unannounced. Thank you for your help and understanding.”

Its sort of like the email he sends out almost every year around this time, or should have sent, the years he forgot. Because, well, because of about fifteen thousand reasons, which I will enumerate for you now.

I live next door to the church. I kid you not. If I were to “commute” to work, assuming that I did any actual work in the church instead of just wandering around in a circle of complete inadequacy and chaos, it would take fifteen seconds. Here’s something fun, when I go up for communion, and my loving husband puts an angular, sharp, broken piece of wafer in my hand, he often whispers to me, “can you go check the temperature on the pork?” And what am I gonna do? I am an obedient wife. I am not one of those women who says to their husbands, “I’m busy, why don’t you do it?” If my husband is worried about his roast during the service, it is my worry. So I take my sip of wine and hobble out the side door and check the pork and am back in place for the last prayer and hymn. My real question is, why does the oven keep going off in the middle of a slow roast? Seriously, that’s two Sunday’s in a row and its starting to be irritating.

Because I live next door to the church, the church practically lives with me. Its really no problem for anyone to pop by at any time. And I’m not talking about my friends here, of whom I have some. I’m talking about random passers by who see the church, see the church house and think to themselves, and I guess to God, but sometimes I think it might be satan, “you know what would be awesome? Money. Money would be awesome. I bet I can get some out of that church.” And so they ring the doorbell and explain that their uncle died in NYC and they don’t have gas in their car and they need to go there right now. I try to smile, I really do, before I announce in my church voice that the church office is next door and that I am not a person who can supply anyone with a bus ticket for any reason. If the church is closed, they will have to come back another time.

So let me just describe in gorier detail how it works. First, we all get up in the morning, and then, because I’m homeschooling all the children, that’s six of them, five grade levels, six children, I get them through morning chores and piano and force myself into some state of awakeness. And then we all settle into the school room and I sit in my nice red chair, and I smile at the children, because I love them, I don’t hate them, I want them to learn something, anything really. And then I open my bible, and we begin to pray and I begin to read the bible. And then my phone begins to buzz and the door bell begins to ring. Its uncanny. Maybe UPS is stopping by. Maybe someone is sick and needing a hospital visit. Maybe it’s that passerby is hoping for that money. Maybe the daycare across the parking lot needs to borrow our plunger. Maybe there has been a funeral at another church and not all the funeral lunch was eaten and so the leftovers are kindly being dropped off for the use our soup kitchen. And every time the doorbell rings all six children leap up from their work and the dog begins to bark hysterically. Every time.

If someone is in the church, and there is always someone in the church, it’s very hard to stay here and sensibly do the tasks of the house, knowing that a friendly chat is only fifteen seconds away. Maybe the dishes could wait for another five hours. Maybe we could do math tomorrow. Elphine’s very best friend in the world spends most of her days in the church office doing her school work and the two of them sit, a single solid brick wall between them, chaffing about the unfairness of it all. And yes, the idea of “sharing school” has been floated and rejected because that would mean the two of them whispering and procrastinating more even than they do already.

For years and years we have had a completely open door policy. Anything that anyone needed, they had only to pop by and we would put the kettle on and rummage in the cupboard for some cookies. We would stop and hear whatever is the trouble, and pray, and be there. This way of living is completely natural to me. I grew up in a part of the world where a visit is believed to be a gift. If someone comes, unannounced, and stands at your door and claps, or calls, you stop everything, everything, to sit with that person. And, if you have your cultural wits about you, you will often venture out into the village to visit others, to stop, to sit, to just be. It’s practically the most incarnational and godly way of living I have ever seen.

And, to some degree, our ministry here has been that kind of life. We have made ourselves completely accessible to the people of Good Shepherd, the children of the neighborhood, to this city, because we want every opportunity for Jesus’ love to be known and proclaimed, whether from the pulpit, in the parking lot, or in our own kitchen.

The problem is, we are the few, the far between of people in Binghamton who live like this. Everybody else makes plans and calls ahead. Everybody else abides by the normal cultural mores of twenty-first century western sensibilities. Everybody is happy that we aren’t, but it hasn’t produced a similar kind of culture where I could drop by on someone unannounced if I felt like it.

And here’s the real kicker. I don’t feel like it anymore. I don’t want to. I am so exhausted by the trooping of all the neighborhood children through my kitchen after their school lets out, by the constant incessant buzzing of my phone, by the pressing in the needs of the world that I don’t any longer have energy even for the handful of people who I wish would pop by. The absence of boundaries has produced not the living out of the gospel so much as me tearing my hair out in rage and frustration, and me retreating into the darkness so that for a while I’ve been saying no to Everything. No to that party, no to coffee with a friend, no to Friday play, no to pretty much everything. It’s the weirdest thing in the world, saying no. It is completely contrary to everything I know and believe. But for the last few weeks and months, it’s been a matter of basic survival.

Tomorrow, spinning off of this thought onto the logical next thought of why the expectations of American culture are totally insane.