The Table Gets Longer by One

She counts the chairs. Not out loud, and not on purpose the first few times, but she counts them now on purpose, every Friday, before anybody sits down.

The first year there were four. Four chairs and a table borrowed from the family downstairs, in a place with a different sky and a language that came at her sideways, and the four of them ate quickly and quietly and nobody put a plate down hard.

She could give you the whole inventory of that year if you had an afternoon. Nobody sat with their back to the door. Her son slept in his shoes for eleven weeks and she said nothing about it because there was nothing to say. The building tests its fire alarm on the first of the month and the first time it went off her daughter was under the table before the second beep, and the second month too, and the third. Her mother would not unpack the suitcase. It stood by the wall with the handle up, for two years, and every so often somebody moved it four inches to sweep and put it back exactly where it had been.

She is not going to tell you what they left. That is hers and it is not the point of the counting.

The second year there were five. A cousin found them. The fifth chair came from a secondhand shop and had a wobble in one leg that her husband fixed with a folded piece of cardboard, and that cardboard is still there.

Then five for a long time. A very long time. Long enough that she stopped believing in the count and went on doing it anyway, the way you keep saying a prayer you have stopped hearing.

Sixth chair last year. Seventh chair this year, tonight, being carried in from the bedroom right now by a boy who does not remember any of the first year at all, which she does not know whether to be glad about.

Seven. It is not a lot. That is the honest arithmetic of it. Seven chairs in nine years and a mother who now keeps her suitcase on top of the wardrobe with the winter blankets in it, and a daughter who still goes very still on the first of the month but does not go under anything, and a son who sleeps in socks like a person.

She would like to tell somebody that it is going well. She cannot, because it is going at a speed no instrument in her possession can detect. Ask her at any given moment whether her family is safer than it was and she will tell you honestly that she has no idea. Ask her how many chairs and she can tell you exactly.

You have a count like that. You are measuring something real with the only instrument you have left, and Ezra 3:12 records an entire people making an enormous noise over a foundation nobody could live in yet, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been laying that foundation in your household at a speed you cannot feel. Stay with me. Nothing here is going to promise you that it speeds up.

They shouted over a line of stone in the dirt

Here is one of the strangest scenes in the Book, and it is strange because of what people are making a noise about.

But many of the priests and Levites and chief of the fathers, who were ancient men, that had seen the first house, when the foundation of this house was laid before their eyes, wept with a loud voice; and many shouted aloud for joy:Ezra 3:12

A people came back from exile. The first thing they did was set the altar on its base, and the second thing they did was lay a foundation, and then there were trumpets and cymbals and a sound that carried a long way.

Over what? Over a line of stone in the dirt. You cannot shelter in a foundation. You cannot eat in one. Nobody sleeps in a foundation, and if you had walked past that site on any afternoon that month you would have seen a rectangle of rubble and gone home unimpressed.

And it took a great many years before that house was finished. The work was interfered with and then it stopped altogether for a long stretch, and a generation aged out in the middle of it, and only much later did anybody put a roof on anything. The shout in Ezra 3 went up over something that was going to be slow beyond anybody's patience.

The next verse is the one that undoes me. The old men who had seen the first house wept out loud, and the young shouted for joy, and the noise of the two was so mixed that the people could not tell them apart, and it was heard far off. Nobody hushed the old men. Nobody told them they were spoiling it. Grief and joy went up as one sound and heaven took the whole noise as worship.

You are living on a laid foundation, and it is written in Ezra 3:12 that a foundation was worth the trumpets long before it was worth a roof, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been setting stones in your family in months when you could not see a single one go down.

Slow is not stalled, and I am not going to tell you it hurries

Now the part this category exists for, and I want to say it carefully, because there are two lies available here and both of them are comfortable.

The first lie is that it is faster than it feels. It is not. I have no idea how fast it is and neither does anybody else who writes to you, and a foundation goes in below the line of sight by design, which means the thing you cannot detect is not evidence of nothing and is also not evidence of soon. I will not put a date on your table. Nothing on this page hints at a year when the chairs fill up.

The second lie is that you could hurry it if you did something differently. You could not. There is no exercise, no discipline, no better attitude and no stronger faith that shortens this, and anybody who tells you otherwise has just handed you the whole weight of your family's recovery to carry on your back, and I will not do that to you. Your daughter going still on the first of the month is not a report card on you. It is a nervous system doing exactly what nine years told it to do, and it is being rebuilt at the speed such things are rebuilt at.

And restored is not the same word as replaced. It never was. Nobody is handing your family back the years, or the house you do not talk about, or the version of your son who would have grown up without eleven weeks of sleeping in his shoes. What is being restored is the family, stone by stone, in a place with a different sky.

You have a work going on in your household that does not depend on your ability to perceive it, and His word says the foundation was laid before their eyes and the house came a very long time afterward, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping the work going in the years when nothing shows.