Everybody in This House Checks My Face First

Your son came in on Thursday and looked at you before he said hello.

Not a long look. About a third of a second. He came through the door, his eyes went to your face, something in him registered a reading, and then he said hi, Mum, and put his bag down.

You have watched for it since. Everybody in this house does it. Your daughter does it from the stairs. Your husband does it from the kitchen doorway. Even the dog, which you have decided not to think about too hard.

They are not frightened of you. This is important and you want it on the record: there is no violence in this house, there never has been, and nobody in it is walking on eggshells in the way that phrase usually means.

They are just reading you first, because you are the weather report, and they have all learned to check it before they commit to anything.

And what has been going round in you since Thursday is not guilt exactly. It is something narrower and more uncomfortable.

You have a lot of power in that hallway. More than you ever asked for and more than you knew about until this week. And you do not entirely trust yourself with it, and you have no idea what to do with a thing like that.

Death and life are in the power of the tongue

Stand there a minute. This one needs handling carefully and I would rather go slowly than be quick and wrong.

Let me put a true thing down first, and Scripture holds me to it and the Spirit is not standing in that hallway to accuse a woman for having presence: what you have noticed is influence, not tyranny. A household reads the person whose state most affects the room, and in most houses that is the person who does the most holding. Nobody in this house is on trial. Not your son, not your daughter, not your husband, and not you. And nobody else's contribution is in scope here; your own mouth is the only thing this article is about.

Now come and look at the verse everybody reaches for at this point, and let me be very plain about what it is and what it is not, because it is the most misused sentence in the whole subject.

Death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof.Proverbs 18:21

That is a proverb. Proverbs are observations about how life generally runs, written as compressed sayings, and they are not incantations and they are not laws of physics.

What it observes is that words have consequences, and that the consequences run in both directions, and that people who love talking will live in the results of their talking. That is a description of a hallway on a Thursday afternoon. It is exactly what you noticed this week.

What it does not say, and I want this stated as flatly as I can: it does not say your words create reality. It does not say that speaking a thing makes it so. It does not hand you a mechanism by which the right sentence produces the right outcome in your family.

If it did, then the whole of that verse would be a description of you as a small god in a corridor, and that is precisely the thing you correctly do not trust yourself with.

The power in that hallway is real and it is influence, and it is not the power to make things happen by saying them. That is not me lowering the stakes to make you feel better. That is what a proverb is and what that one actually claims, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it in a hall on a Thursday.

Here is what nobody explains, and it is the whole of why this site exists. When you speak a blessing over that house, you are not exercising a power you possess. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said. Your mouth is a door. God is the one coming through it. The weight is entirely His and none of it is yours, and that is not a demotion; it is the only arrangement under which a woman who does not trust herself with power can safely open her mouth.

A blessing is God's word in your mouth, not your word given force, and the difference is the whole of it. Scripture says peace be to this house, which Christ told His people to say (Luke 10:5), and He also told them that if the house was not worthy the peace would return to them, which is God retaining control of the outcome, and the Spirit is the one who carries it either way.

What to do with a power you did not ask for

Now let me name the actual danger, because it is not that you might shout.

The danger is that a woman who discovers she has influence in a room will try to manage the room with it. Not maliciously. Anxiously. She will start arranging her face on the way through the front door, and monitoring the effect, and adjusting, and within about a month she will be performing a state she is not in, in a house full of people who read her for a living and will detect the performance instantly and will not know what it means.

That is what happens when influence gets treated as a tool, and it produces exactly the atmosphere it was deployed to fix.

That is not a fault in you and I will not make it one. It is the obvious next move for a conscientious person and it is the wrong one. And what is written never once handed anybody a technique for governing a household by the arrangement of their face, and the Spirit is not asking you to become an actress in your own hallway.

God has never asked you to govern that house with your presence, and He has never once made your emotional state the thing everybody's evening rests on. It is written that not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts (Zechariah 4:6), which is God ruling out human capacity as the mechanism, in writing and in advance, and the same Spirit who breathed that is in this hallway.

Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you the house will stop reading your face if you say this, and I am not telling you that a blessing puts something in the air. It is not a technique and it is not atmosphere management and if it becomes either of those it has stopped being what this article is about. What God does in that house is His, entirely.

What I can put in your hands is this: there is something you can say in that hallway that is not yours and carries no weight of yours, and that is precisely why you can be trusted with it. God's word does not come back to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and the reason it is safe in your mouth is that its power was never located there.