The Chair Facing the Door

He gets there eleven minutes early, which is the amount of time it takes to be early without anybody remarking on it.

The fellowship hall has folding chairs, the brown ones with the crossbar that catches your heel, and long tables with the paper covering taped down at the corners. He takes the chair at the end of the second table, back to the wall, facing the double doors. It is the same chair every Tuesday. If somebody has taken it he will stand by the coffee and wait, and if the wait gets long he will remember an errand, and everybody thinks he is the man who is always half on his way somewhere.

He knows where the fire door is. He knows that the kitchen has a back exit into the parking lot and that it is propped in summer. He does not sit in the middle of a row, ever, and he has not sat with his back to a room since a Thursday three years ago.

You do not need the details of what happened and I am not going to invent any for you. What matters is the shape of it: an institution he had trusted with the most important thing he had did not do what it said it would do. Reports were made. A file existed. Somebody in an office was believed instead of him. Eventually a letter came saying the matter had been closed, and the letter was courteous, and that was the worst part.

He did the right things after. He got help. He kept showing up on Tuesdays, which is more than most people manage. And when the woman he sees on Thursdays asked him what progress would actually look like, he heard himself answer before he had decided to: sitting with my back to the door.

That was three years ago too.

So every Tuesday he does the arithmetic while the crockpots come out. Three years. Thirty-six months. A hundred and fifty-some Tuesdays. And the chair is the chair, and the doors are still in front of him, and he cannot make himself want it differently no matter how many times he tells himself he is safe in a room full of people eating chili.

And the thing under the thing, which he has said out loud to exactly one person: everybody else seems to get somewhere. Every article, every testimony, every man who stands up and says he used to be this way. He reads them and something in him goes quiet and mean, and then he feels wrong for that too.

You have a chair. Yours may be a phone you do not answer, a form you cannot make yourself sign, a building you drive around instead of past, a name in your contacts you have not deleted and cannot look at. And the calendar keeps handing you a number that feels like a verdict. You are three years into a work God is doing, and the number on the calendar is not your grade. Psalm 40:2 says He set the feet on the rock and He is the one who established the going, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been at this the whole time you thought nothing was moving.

Look at who is doing the verbs

Here is the verse, and I want you to read it for the grammar before you read it for the comfort, because the grammar is the comfort.

He drew me up from the pit of destruction, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.Psalm 40:2

An older English rendering puts that last clause as: and established my goings. Hold on to that one, because it is the one this article is about.

Now count the verbs and count the subjects. Drew up. Brought out. Set. Established. Four actions, one subject, and it is not the man in the pit. There is not a single thing in that verse that the rescued person does for himself. He does not climb, he does not improve his grip, he does not demonstrate progress in order to qualify for the next stage. He is in clay and then he is on rock, and every verb between those two states belongs to God.

And now the word people skate past. Miry. Clay. A bog does not let go of anything quickly, and that is not a moral failing in the man standing in it. It is a property of clay. Nobody has ever been pulled out of deep mud fast. The suction is real, the ground gives up its hold by inches, and the length of that pull tells you about the ground and tells you nothing at all about the one being pulled.

So when you sit down at the end of the second table and do the arithmetic, understand what you are actually measuring. Not your faith. Not your effort. The depth of what you were in.

You are being drawn up by somebody who has never once let go of a wrist. His word says in Psalm 40:2 that He is the one who does the drawing and the setting and the establishing, and it is the Holy Spirit at work in you on a Tuesday, in a hall smelling of chili, whether or not one thing about that chair has changed.

Restored is not the same word as replaced

Now the sentence this whole site stands on, and then two things I refuse to do to you.

Restored is not replaced. Nobody is issuing you a new nervous system, and God is not going to hand you back the version of yourself who walked into buildings without counting the exits, because that man did not know what he knows now. Restored means God puts back into a person what was taken out of them. What was taken from you was not your seating preference. It was your ability to rest in a room. And that is what He is putting back, at the speed a thing like that goes back in.

Here is what I will not do. I will not tell you this speeds up. I do not know that, nobody knows that, and a promise like that would put a clock in your hand that you would then have to watch. And I will not hand you a technique, because a technique makes the pace your responsibility, and the pace of this is not yours and never was. Anybody who has told you that you would be further along by now with more discipline was describing something they have not been through.

And one more, and I want it in your ears the next time you count Tuesdays: noticing nothing is not evidence. A tree in February is not doing nothing. There is no season of the year when more is happening underground than the one where the branches look most like they have quit. You have three years of not being able to see what God is doing, and that is a report on your eyes, not on His work.

You have a going that God Himself established, and it was not established on a schedule you were given a copy of. It is written in Psalm 40:2 that He set the feet and He steadied the steps, and the same Spirit who has been under you since that Thursday is the one keeping this moving at the pace clay actually gives.

And your anger at that office, at that letter, at the courtesy of it, is not on trial here. It is not bitterness that you have failed to deal with. It is what a person feels when something is taken by people who had a duty. I am not going to name a single thing for you to do about anybody, because the account is God's and it is not in your hands and it never was, and He has not mislaid it.