The Chair I Never Sit In

Three streets back from the market there is a courtyard where the fig tree has grown right up through the awning, and for twenty years the same man has fed everyone who came through the gate.

You do not need his name. What you need is the table. It runs almost the length of the wall, and on any given evening there are nine people at it, or fifteen, or the whole street when somebody has a wedding. He bakes at five. He carries the water jug around the table twice before anyone thinks to ask. He knows which of the children will not eat olives and he cuts the bread differently for the old woman at the end because of her hands.

And there is a chair at the head of that table with his name on it in the family's mind, and in twenty years it has held coats, and bags, and once a sleeping child through an entire meal, and it has never once held him. He eats standing at the counter after they have gone. He has always eaten standing at the counter after they have gone.

Ask him why and he will laugh and say somebody has to keep the tea coming.

That is not why.

There is one thing. Not a habit and not a season, one thing, from a long time back, that he has never said to a single living person. Not to his wife, who knows every other thing about him. Not to his brother, who tells him everything and assumes it goes both ways. He has carried it into that courtyard every evening for twenty years and set it down behind the counter and gone out with the bread.

And here is the part he has never even said to himself: he has never said it to God either. He has prayed for other people's marriages and other people's sons. He has prayed for rain and for a neighbor's diagnosis. He has prayed around that one thing for twenty years the way a man drives the long way to avoid one street.

You know that chair. You may not have a courtyard, but you have a chair. You are the one everybody calls, the one who shows up, the one with the casserole and the jump leads and the second key. And you have one thing you have never said out loud to anybody, and you have never said it to God, and you have gone twenty years believing that not saying it is what keeps the table full.

Stay with me. It is not.

He has known the whole time

Here is the first thing, and it is going to sound too simple to be worth twenty years: God already knows.

Not in a vague way, and not as a figure of speech. Psalm 139 says He is acquainted with all your ways, that He knew the word on your tongue before it got there. Nothing you are protecting is news to Him. The secrecy has not been keeping it from God. It has only been keeping it from you and Him together.

Which means the thing you have actually been carrying is not the thing itself. It is the theory that if He ever really saw it, He would go. You have been standing at that counter on a theory, and the theory is not in the word of God anywhere, and the Holy Spirit has never once whispered it to you. He was there when it happened. He has been at your table every evening since, and He did not leave, and He is not leaving now.

Behold, You delight in truth in the inward being, and You teach me wisdom in the secret heart.Psalm 51:6

Read that again, slowly. In the inward being. In the secret heart. That is not a verse about a man being caught. That is a verse about the one place God is most interested in being welcomed, and it happens to be the exact room you have kept locked. You are wanted in the very place you assumed disqualified you, and that is what is written, and it is the Spirit who is standing at that door and not an accusation.

Nobody is asking you to describe it

Now hear the second thing, because I think it is the one that has stopped you.

You do not have to tell a person. Not your wife, not your brother, not a small group, not a pastor, not me. There is no verse anywhere that requires it, and I am not going to invent one. Some of what people carry is theirs to bring to God and to nobody else on earth, and that is not cowardice, it is discretion.

And you do not have to describe it to God either. He does not need the file read to Him. You are not preparing a statement. You are not on trial this evening, and Scripture does not open a courtroom over a man who comes home, and the Holy Spirit is not taking notes. Psalm 32 says the man is blessed whose sin is covered, and then it says the weight lifted when he stopped keeping quiet, and it never once records what he actually said.

That matters. The psalm records the acknowledging and not the wording. So it can be one sentence. It can be four words. It can be that thing. You have permission to be inarticulate about this, and the word of God is what gives it to you, and the Spirit takes what comes out and carries it the rest of the way.

What the standing was really about

Twenty years of standing at a counter is not laziness about chairs. It is a verdict a man passed on himself, quietly, and then served dinner around.

Somewhere in there he decided that hosting was allowed and belonging was not. He could feed the table. He could not sit at it. A servant may stay in a house he does not belong in, and if you never sit, nobody ever has to decide whether you should.

Sitting is the risk. Sitting is the claim. You were made a son and not a servant in that house, and Romans 8 says the Spirit you received does not make you a slave again to fear, and that is the Spirit doing it and not your nerve. The chair was never being kept from you. It was being kept for you, and you loaded it with coats.