The Chair I Have Sat In for Twenty Years

Twenty years in the same chair. Not the same building, because they moved down the block in the two thousands, but the same chair, or at least she has decided it is, and the woman who does her hair now is the daughter of the woman who used to.

It is a good hour. The heat lamp and the noise and somebody's radio and the smell of it and the sound of four women all talking at once and none of them listening, which is its own kind of church.

And then the girl says, with the comb in her teeth, so what have you been up to.

She has an answer ready. She always has an answer ready. It goes: oh, you know, the usual, and then it is supposed to hand off to something, a trip, a grandchild, a thing at work, and today it does not hand off to anything. It goes oh, you know, and then it goes the usual, and then it goes nowhere at all, and she hears the exact moment her own sentence runs out of road, and so does the girl, who says something kind straight away and turns the water on.

Fifty five. And she sat there under the heat with her hands in her lap and did the thing she does, which is to try and find one item. One thing she could have said. And she came up with nothing that would have finished the sentence, and then she did what people do, which is to move from I have nothing to say to I am somebody with nothing to say, and those are two completely different sentences and she made the move in about four seconds without noticing it.

The radio went to an advertisement. The girl came back with the water. The four women down the row were laughing about something.

You have been in that chair. You know the exact feel of a sentence running out of road in front of somebody kind. And the missing item was never the problem. The problem is that you and everybody in that room have agreed, without ever once discussing it, that a person is what they can say out loud in eight seconds, and God has never agreed to any such thing.

He is not looking where they are looking

I want to be careful, because there is a version of this that gives you a better eight seconds and calls it help. It is not help. Coaching you into a stronger answer leaves a person exactly where she started, which is standing in front of a room being priced. So I am not writing you an answer. I am telling you who is not asking.

There is a moment in 1 Samuel where a prophet is looking at a line of tall sons and getting it wrong, and God stops him. Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature, because I have refused him: for the Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7). Man looks at the outward. God does not. He says it about a prophet, which should tell you how deep the habit runs.

You are being looked at by somebody who is not looking at any of what you could not say. That is not a comfort I invented; 1 Samuel 16:7 says the Lord looks on the heart, and the Spirit who moved Samuel to write it down knew that the room would go on looking at the outside anyway.

And notice where the story goes. The one God is after is not in the line at all. He is out with the sheep, doing the least reportable work in the family, and nobody thought to call him in. Whatever David had been doing out there did not make it into anybody's eight seconds either.

But the LORD said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature; because I have refused him: for the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart.1 Samuel 16:7

The four seconds where it turned

I want to go back to the four seconds, because that is where the injury actually happened and it was not the girl with the comb who did it.

I have nothing to say is a fact about a conversation. I am somebody with nothing to say is a verdict about a person. One of those is true and harmless and the other is false and has been running for years, and the whole distance between them was covered in about four seconds under a heat lamp.

This is yours right now, in the chair: a life God is reading in a place nobody in that room can see. Scripture says it flatly in Jeremiah 17:10, I the Lord search the heart, I try the reins, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does that searching, which means the assessment you have been dreading has already been made by somebody with better information than the room.

It is already settled, and it was settled somewhere your answer never reached. Psalm 139:1 says He has searched you and known you, past tense, and verse 2 says He understands your thought from far off, and the Spirit who inspired that psalm did not need a summary from you to do it.

Now let me name the thing under the trailing off, because it is not embarrassment. It is this: if I cannot produce an item, there is no evidence that I exist in any way that counts. That is the sentence, and you would never say it out loud, and it has been running under twenty years of good hours in a chair.

What twenty years actually grew

Here is the distinction that will not fit in eight seconds and does not need to.

An item is output. It is nameable, datable, sayable while somebody rinses your hair. Fruit is what grew on a person who stayed attached, and John 15:5 says the branch bears it and does not make it, and the branch is not handed a list. Most of it left the room in somebody else. The woman who used to do her hair had a hard year in two thousand and nine and there is a reason she kept coming to work through it, and it has to do with a woman in a chair who never once made a big thing of it, and none of that has ever been said out loud by anybody, and it is not going to be.

You have grown a great deal that will never fit in a sentence. Galatians 5:22 lists what the Spirit grows, love and joy and peace and longsuffering and gentleness, and not one item on that list is reportable in eight seconds under a heat lamp; the Holy Spirit grew every one of them in twenty years you would call empty.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since I am not handing anybody a program. One thing. On the walk home, or while the kettle does what it does, tell Him about one hour from those twenty years that could not be reported to anybody. Somebody's bad week. A phone call. A Tuesday. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody asks that for an item.