Almost every family house has one. It started out as the spare bedroom, the place where a visiting aunt from Brooklyn or a cousin up from the country would sleep. Then an old dresser went in “just for now”. Then the exercise bicycle, bought in a burst of good intention. Then the plastic crates of school books nobody will read again, the extra chairs from the christening, the television that still works but has been replaced, and a sewing machine waiting for a repair that never comes. Today the door opens halfway and stops against something.
When somebody does need to stay, the family scrambles, or says, with real regret, “We would love to have you, but we just don’t have the room.”
No space in the guest room
We tend to picture the Christmas story with a harassed innkeeper turning Mary and Joseph away from a hotel. Many scholars read Luke 2:7 a little differently. The word often translated “inn” can also mean a guest room, and the NIV renders it that way: Mary laid her son in a manger “because there was no guest room available for them.” In an ordinary village home of the time, the family and even the animals might share one main living space, with a separate room kept for guests. That room, on this reading, was already occupied, so the young couple were given what was left, the lower part of the house where the animals were fed.
Nobody in the story is a villain. The house was simply full. Other people had got there first. And so the Son of God was born beside the feeding trough.
It is hard not to think of our own crowded spare rooms. The difference is that ours are usually full not of guests but of things.
How a room slowly changes its purpose
No one decides to turn a guest room into a storeroom. It happens by a hundred small postponements. Some of them are thrift: our parents and grandparents lived through years when throwing away a usable thing felt close to sin, and there is wisdom in that. Some are grief: the room holds a late husband’s work boots or a child’s trophies from before they migrated. Some are hope: the fabric for curtains we will make when there is time.
Consider a couple in their sixties whose children have all settled abroad. Two bedrooms now sit mostly unused. One holds a barrel’s worth of clothes the grandchildren have outgrown, the other a collection of furniture kept “in case one of them comes home to live”. Meanwhile a young woman from their church, newly arrived in town for a nursing job, is paying most of her wage for a room across the city because nobody she knows has space. Nobody has done anything wrong. The house has simply been organised around things that might be needed rather than people who need it now.
What the space is for
Scripture is not against possessions. Proverbs praises the household that is prepared and the woman who is not afraid of snow for her family (Proverbs 31:21). But the New Testament keeps pressing the question of what our goods are for. Hebrews 13:2 urges believers not to forget to show hospitality to strangers. Peter tells the churches to offer hospitality to one another without grumbling (1 Peter 4:9), which suggests it was often inconvenient then as well.
A room is one of the most generous things a household can offer. For a student, a relative between jobs, a widow waiting for her own repairs to be finished after a storm, or a family visiting from abroad for a funeral, the difference between “come and stay” and “sorry, we have no space” can be enormous. It is worth asking whether our spare room is spare only in name.
Making room, practically
Clearing a room that has filled up over ten years is rarely done in one Saturday, and it does not need to be. A few approaches that tend to help:
- Decide what the room is for first. A bed and a clear surface? A place a grandchild can do homework? Once the purpose is named, it becomes easier to see what does not belong.
- Deal with the easy things. Broken items, duplicates, and anything with no clear owner can go first. That early progress keeps everyone going.
- Give the sentimental things their own time. A box of a parent’s belongings deserves an afternoon with the right people present, not a hurried decision on a busy morning.
- Pass things on while they are still useful. The chairs, the working television and the outgrown uniforms may be exactly what another family, a church hall or a basic school is looking for.
- Plan storage that serves the room. A high shelf, a lidded trunk under the bed or a cupboard built into an alcove can keep genuinely useful items without swallowing the floor.
The room inside the house
The Christmas story is usually preached as a call to make room for Christ in our hearts, and that is right. But hearts and houses are not as separate as we sometimes suppose. How we arrange our homes tends to reveal what we are holding on to and whom we are expecting. A room kept ready for people is a small, daily way of saying that we expect God to send someone to our door.
Jesus later told his followers that when they welcomed a stranger they welcomed him (Matthew 25:35). The guest room in Bethlehem was full that night. Ours does not have to be.
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