Dressed Without Looking

You have a system, and it is a good one.

Nobody taught it to you. It assembled itself over years, one small adjustment at a time, until it became the ordinary way that mornings happen in your house. You know which things go on in which order. You know how to check a hem or a collar by feel and by the small mirror over the dresser and by the reflection in a window at the right angle. You have never once needed a full length view to leave the house well put together, and if anybody asked you would not be able to say when that started.

It is not a secret, exactly. It is just something nobody has ever noticed, including, for long stretches, you.

I want to say the important thing first, because on a page like this it usually comes last if it comes at all. You have not been idle about any of this. You have been working on it for most of your adult life. You have tried and stopped and tried again and you have gotten back up more times than anybody who has never had this fight could count. Nobody builds a whole practiced morning around one thing they are avoiding without decades of paying very close attention, and paying attention is the opposite of not caring.

So I am not going to ask you to stand in front of a long mirror this morning. I am not going to make that the test of anything, and I am not going to tell you that you will feel better if you do it, because you might not and I would be selling something.

What I want to do is tell you about the first question God ever asked a person, and who He asked it of.

The system is not the problem

Let us get one thing out of the way, because you may be braced for it.

The system is not a sin. Getting dressed by feel is not disobedience and there is no verse against a small mirror. If you leave this page having decided that your morning routine is one more thing to be fixed, then I have handed you exactly what everybody else hands you and I have failed at the one thing I came to do.

What is worth looking at is not the system. It is the sentence underneath it.

You are not carrying a bad habit here, and no arrangement of mirrors in a bedroom has ever once been the thing that needed dealing with. Genesis 3:9 has God walk into a garden where somebody is hiding and ask where he is, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a question like that sound like being wanted rather than being caught.

The sentence underneath the system is something like: it is easier for everybody if that does not get looked at. And you did not decide that this morning. It was decided a long time ago, probably by somebody much younger than you are now, and she was doing her best with what she had.

You were being protected by a younger version of yourself, and there has never once been a moment when that protection was what God required of you. The written word says the LORD God called unto Adam and said, Where art thou, which is a question asked by somebody who already knew, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes the accusation out of it.

The first question in the Bible

The first question God asks a human being is not what have you done.

And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou? (Genesis 3:9, King James Version)

Where are you.

He knew. That is the thing to hold onto. Nothing about that question is God gathering information. He is not searching the garden. He is calling to somebody who has put something between the two of them, and He is doing it in words, out loud, using the ordinary voice He had always used.

You are being called rather than hunted, and the God who asks where you are has never once been short of the answer. Genesis 3 has the question come first, before anything is dealt with and before anybody is sent anywhere, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a first question feel like a hand held out.

And read what the hiding was about. It was not about being unloved. Adam says plainly why he hid: he was afraid, and so he covered himself and got behind something. Fear first, covering second. Which is exactly the order in your bedroom.

You have been hiding out of fear and not out of rebellion, and no covering you ever arranged has once been read by God as defiance. The Spirit of God is the one who separates fear from rebellion in a person who has spent years confusing the two, and the passage is the written word where the man says he was afraid and God does not argue with him about it.

He is already in the room

Now here is the thing I actually came to say, and it is not about mirrors at all.

There is a version of God most of us carry into a bedroom in the morning, and He is standing just outside. Waiting to be invited. Waiting to see how the day goes, and how you do, and whether this is a good week. Present in the house but not exactly in the room, which is convenient, because it means the room is yours and what happens in it is unobserved.

He is in the room. He was in the room before you woke up. Every morning of this arrangement, all the years of the small mirror and the practiced order and the checking by feel, He has been in there, and He has not once been standing outside the door forming a view about how it is going.

You are not getting ready in an empty room, and God has never once been waiting in the hall to see how it turns out. The written word says He called out in a garden to somebody who thought he had gotten out of sight, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that ordinary rather than frightening.

And if that is true, then something else follows, and it is the reason this matters. Nothing in your morning has to be arranged for Him. He is not an arrival. There is no version of getting ready that gets you ready for Him.

You have nothing left to arrange, and there has never once been a moment when God needed you presentable. The Spirit of God is the one who says that inside a person instead of over them, and Genesis 3 is the written word where God comes looking in the cool of the day, using words, for somebody who is behind a tree.