I Am the One Making This Flat Awkward

The kettle takes about ninety seconds and it is the longest ninety seconds of the day.

Three of you. It has been three of you since last September and it was genuinely good until about February. You went to things together. There was a period in November where somebody made a group chat name that is still there and is still funny.

Now there is a thing in that kitchen that you would struggle to describe to anybody outside the flat, because every individual component of it is nothing.

Somebody comes in while you are making tea and says hi and you say hi. It is completely normal. It is also, unmistakably, careful.

You have been assuming for months that it was them, or that it was one of them, or that it was a thing between the two of them that you were catching the edge of.

And on Wednesday you came in while the two of them were in there, and you heard the tail end of something completely ordinary and unremarkable, and both of them were easy, mid-laugh, and then you walked in.

And the room changed. Not much. Not in any way you could film. But it changed, and it changed toward you, and you stood at that counter waiting for a kettle understanding for the first time that the careful thing in that kitchen is not something you have been catching.

It is something you have been bringing.

Rule is a word about who is in charge

Stand there a minute while it boils. I am not going to tell you to have a conversation with them, and I am definitely not going to tell you to bring it up at a flat meeting.

Let me put a true thing down first, and Scripture will hold me to it and the Spirit will not have me making a case against a twenty-four year old: what you saw on Wednesday is not a verdict on you as a person. It is information about a room, and you have handled it the way a serious person handles information, which is by not looking away from it. Nobody in that flat is on trial. Not either of them, and not you.

And nobody else is in scope here. Not one word of this is about what they contribute. Your own mouth is the only thing in this article, and that is not a punishment, it is the only thing anybody ever actually has.

Now come and look at a verb that gets read as though it were about feelings and is actually about governance.

And let the peace of God rule in your hearts, to the which also ye are called in one body; and be ye thankful.Colossians 3:15

Rule. Not visit. Not settle. Not be present in the general vicinity.

The word Paul uses there is the word for an umpire, the one who decides, the authority in the room whose call stands. He is not describing a mood. He is describing who is in charge of a space when two things are competing for it.

And notice the second half of the verse, which almost nobody reads with the first: to the which also ye are called in one body. He is talking about several people sharing something. This is not a private interior verse. It is about a group of people who have to be in the same room.

Peace ruling is a matter of what governs a room rather than what everybody in it happens to be feeling, and you are permitted to name the governor of a kitchen. That is not me being reassuring to somebody at twenty-four. That is what is written, and what that verb means, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it in a flat kitchen at eight in the morning.

Here is what nobody explains about blessing a room. When you speak over that kitchen, you are not managing your flatmates and you are not performing an ease you have not felt since February. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said. Your mouth is a door. God is the one coming through it, and He does not need the situation resolved first.

A blessing spoken in that doorway is not a conversation you are having with them behind their backs. Scripture says peace be to this house, which Christ told His people to say on walking into houses that were not theirs (Luke 10:5), and the Spirit is the one who carries it, and nothing about it requires anybody in that flat to know it happened.

What has actually been happening since February

Now let me name it precisely, because you have been calling it awkwardness and awkwardness is a description of a symptom. What is written names it differently, and the Spirit is not accusing you of anything.

Something happened in February. You may or may not know what it is; a lot of people in your position genuinely do not, and if you do, this article is not going to ask you to produce it.

What happened after February is the part worth seeing. You started monitoring. Coming into a room and reading it, checking whether things were normal, noting the temperature. Entirely reasonable and completely invisible from the outside.

But a person who is monitoring a room is not relaxed in it, and other people cannot tell the difference between somebody who is monitoring and somebody who is displeased. So the carefulness you have been detecting is very largely other people responding to a person who appears to be assessing them.

That is not a character flaw and I will not make it one. It is what vigilance does in a shared space. And what is written never once asked you to sort out your own state before a room could be blessed, and the Spirit is not standing at that counter grading your February.

God is not asking you to be a more relaxed person by Friday, and He has never once made your ease the condition of His peace ruling in a room. It is written that not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts (Zechariah 4:6), which rules out effort and personality as the mechanism, in writing and in advance, and the same Spirit who breathed that is in that kitchen while the kettle goes.

Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you the flat will feel different if you say this. I have no authority to promise you an atmosphere in exchange for a sentence, and there will be mornings when you say it at eight and the ninety seconds is still the longest of the day. And I am not telling you to move out, or to have it out, or to fix a friendship, none of which is what this is.

What I can put in your hands is this: something can be said over that room before any of you are in it, and it does not require you to have worked out what happened in February. God's word does not come back to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and a twenty-four year old saying twelve words in a doorway in a dressing gown is not doing a small thing.