Twelve Minutes on the Porch

He timed it, which tells you most of what you need to know about him.

He did not mean to time it. He sat down in the porch chair at ten past seven because his wife said, with the particular flatness she uses maybe twice a year, that he had not sat down outside without a job in his hands since March. He looked at the clock on the stove on the way out, because he looks at clocks, and he sat down.

At twenty two minutes past seven he was up out of the chair and halfway across the yard because there is a gate at the far end of the run that has been dropping on its hinge since spring and he had suddenly, for the first time in nine weeks, remembered it.

Twelve minutes.

He got to the gate and stood in front of it, and did not touch it, because he had understood something on the way across the grass and it had stopped him about four feet short. He was not going to the gate. He was leaving the chair. Those are two different journeys and one of them is a lie a man tells himself with his own legs.

Sixty one. He has worked this place since he was nineteen. He can tell you what he was doing on any given week of the year without a calendar, because the year tells him. And he cannot sit in a chair for a quarter of an hour.

He came back and sat down again, which took something. And he lasted, this time, about six minutes, and then his hands started, and there is a thing his hands do when they have nothing, which is that the right one goes to the arm of the chair and starts working at a split in the wood that he has been meaning to fill.

The light went long and orange down the field and made the fence posts throw shadows about forty feet. Somewhere a dog. And he sat there with his hand working at a split in a chair arm, and thought a sentence that he did not like, which was: I do not know how to do this.

You have sat in that chair. Maybe your hands go to a phone instead of a split in the wood, but you know the exact feeling of the twelve minutes and the sudden urgent memory of the gate. And here is the thing: the gate was never the problem, and the chair is not a test, and the psalm that everybody quotes about stillness was not spoken to somebody sitting on a porch on a nice evening.

Where that verse was actually spoken

I have to be careful here, because there is a version of this that hands a restless man a stillness practice and calls it depth. It is not depth. Ten minutes of breathing with a timer running is still a job in his hands, and he will do it the way he does everything, which is completely and without benefit. So there is no practice coming out of this.

Be still, and know that I am God (Psalm 46:10). Everybody has that on something. What almost nobody has is the address on the front of it.

Psalm 46 is a war psalm. The earth is being removed. The mountains are being carried into the middle of the sea. The waters roar and are troubled, the heathen rage, the kingdoms are moved. And in the middle of that, God says be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.

That verse was never a suggestion for a quiet evening. It is spoken over chaos, and the stillness in it is not an atmosphere. The Hebrew behind be still is closer to let go, or cease, or drop your hands. It is what you say to somebody who is holding on to something with both fists.

You are being told to drop your hands, not to produce a mood. That is not a softening of the verse; Psalm 46:10 sits inside a psalm about mountains going into the sea, and the Holy Spirit who put it there put it in the loudest possible room on purpose.

And notice the second half, which is the half that does the work. And know that I am God. The knowing is not something a man generates by sitting still successfully. The stillness stops the fists; the knowing is God's to give.

Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.Psalm 46:10

Abiding has no technique to fail at

Now John 15, which is the ground under this whole thing.

Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me (John 15:4). There is no branch skill. A branch is not better at abiding in June than it was in February. It is attached, and the sap comes up, and something appears on it that it did not make and could not have made.

Which means twelve minutes was not a failure. There was no exam. A man who got up and crossed a yard and stood in front of a gate he did not touch was attached the entire way across the grass.

You have been attached through nine weeks of never sitting down, and the attachment was never what the sitting was for. John 15:4 makes abiding a place rather than an achievement, and the Spirit is the sap; a branch does not come loose because its hands are restless.

And that is the guardrail, plainly: a man who cannot sit still is not a man who is far from God. He is a man whose hands have not been empty since he was nineteen, and those are completely different diagnoses.

This is yours already, split in the chair arm and all: a standing in Him that twelve minutes cannot grade. Colossians 3:3 says your life is hidden with Christ in God, and hidden is a thing done to you and kept by Him; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) was out on that grass at twenty two past seven.

What the hands are for

Let me say the thing under the restlessness, because it is not a character flaw and it is not laziness in reverse.

It sounds like this: if my hands are empty, I will find out what I am worth when I am not doing anything, and I have not wanted to find that out since I was about twenty five. That is the sentence. It has never been said out loud on this porch or anywhere else.

You were worth what you are worth before your hands were ever any good at anything. Ephesians 2:10 says you are His workmanship, made in Christ Jesus, and workmanship is a word about what somebody else did; the Holy Spirit who carried that sentence into the letter did not attach a productivity clause to it.

Fruit is not output, and a farm is a good place to see the difference. Output is the gate, the fence, the run, the year. Fruit is what has grown on a man over forty two years of getting up and doing the thing whether or not anybody noticed, and Galatians 5:22 calls part of that faithfulness, and it did not come off a to do list.