The Words Beside The Washbasin

For the believer who has been reading the same eight words every morning without hearing one of them.

The tile beside the washbasin has eight words on it, and they've been there since before she moved in.

It's the old hand-painted sort, cream with a blue border, the kind somebody's aunt made at an evening class in about 1982. The previous owners left it because it was grouted in and moving it would have meant taking out two others.

She cleans around it twice a week. She has cleaned around it for eleven years. She could not have told you this morning what it says, and she reads it every single day, and both of those are true at once.

Today the light is coming in at a different angle because the clocks went back. The words are catching it along the top edge, and she stops with the cloth in her hand and actually reads them.

They're from the verse about confessing with your mouth. Eight words, blue on cream, in a hand that clearly ran out of room near the end and squeezed the last two in smaller.

Eleven years of mornings in front of it, somewhere near four thousand of them, and not one reading.

You are able to hear a sentence you have been looking at for years without ever taking in. The written Word names your mouth alongside your heart, and the Holy Spirit is the one waking the words when they finally get read.

The Blindness That Comes With Familiarity

This isn't a failure of attention, and it certainly isn't a failure of faith.

Your eyes are extremely good at not wasting effort. Anything that has been in the same place, unchanged, for long enough gets filed as background, and after that it's processed without being read. That's not laziness, it's efficiency, and you'd be exhausted by lunchtime without it.

The same mechanism handles sentences. A line you've heard four hundred times gets routed to the part of you that recognizes shapes, and recognition feels almost exactly like understanding from the inside.

So four thousand mornings go past. You aren't ignoring the tile. You're seeing it perfectly well, and that's the whole difficulty, because seeing it is how it stopped being read.

Mouth and Heart, Named Together

Here's the verse the tile comes from, in full:

That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.Romans 10:9 (KJV)

Notice what's in it and what isn't. There's a mouth, a heart, and an event that happened. There's no instruction about setting, no requirement about how often, and nothing at all about how well you were paying attention the last four thousand times.

It's a sentence about one act with an inside and an outside, written by somebody who couldn't imagine the halves coming apart.

You hold something with an outside as well as an inside, and both were named together. The written Word puts the mouth and the heart in a single sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one joining them in you today.

A Thing You See Every Day Is the Thing You Stop Reading

Here's what I'd carry out of that bathroom if I could take a single thing away with me.

The objects you'd miss most are the ones you look at least. The photograph on the hall shelf. The ring you'd panic about losing that you haven't examined in a decade. The tile.

That's not carelessness about what you love. It's the opposite: it's what permanence does. You stop inspecting whatever you know will still be there in the morning.

So the eight words above the washbasin went unread for eleven years precisely because they were never going anywhere. The invisibility was a form of security, which is an odd and rather comforting thing to discover with a cloth in your hand.

You stopped reading it because you were sure of it, never because you had stopped caring. The written Word stays exactly where it was put whether or not anybody is looking, and the Holy Spirit is the one who eventually turns the light on it at an angle.

Inspection is for whatever might not be there in the morning. The tile was never going anywhere, so it joined the doorframe and the light switch and the loose tap washer in the enormous category of what a house simply is. That category is the safest place an object can be, and it is also the quietest.

Nothing Here Is a Grade on Your Mornings

Let me be plain, because there's a version of this message that would do harm and I won't write it.

Nobody is marking four thousand mornings. Attention isn't a virtue you can manufacture by resolving to try harder tomorrow, and a woman who cleaned around a true sentence for eleven years hasn't been failing at anything.

I'm also not saying these particular words are binding, or that a believer in a room that has never recited a line of them is missing something. The faith is the same in a house with a tile and in a house without one.

You can read it on the four thousand and first morning and nothing was lost in the others. Scripture stays where it was put, and the Holy Spirit does the waking rather than the grading.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.