From The Chair By The Door

The apology comes out before anything else. Every time. She has heard herself do it so often that she has started listening for it, the way you listen for a fault in an engine.

I am sorry, love, I have to sit, is that all right.

And every single person says of course, and means it, and one woman last month said you sit, I will come down to you and knelt on a hall floor at seventy-two years old, which nearly finished her.

The chair is by the door because that is where the chairs are and because getting to the front and back again costs more than she has now. So people come to her. They have worked it out among themselves without any announcement, and there is a small queue some evenings, and she hates the small queue and is also glad of it.

Thirty years she did this standing. Hands on shoulders, moving down a row, three hours some nights and driving home at midnight with her arms aching and nothing else in her that could be described as tired.

Her hips now. And a heart thing that is managed. And a doctor who used the word sensible, which she has decided not to take personally.

The sentence arrives every time, just before the apology does: praying from a chair is a lesser kind of praying, and everybody is being kind about it.

You know that apology. It might be a chair, or a bed, or a phone instead of a visit. You cannot do it the way you did it, so you explain yourself first, every time, and the explaining has become part of the thing.

Where Paul was when the Lord stood with him

There is a sentence near the end of the last letter Paul wrote, and it is about a bad day in a court room, and everybody quotes half of it.

Notwithstanding the Lord stood with me, and strengthened me; that by me the preaching might be fully known, and that all the Gentiles might hear.2 Timothy 4:17

The Lord stood with me. Now look at the sentence before it, because that is the one people leave out: at my first answer no man stood with me, but all men forsook me.

So Paul is describing a room where he had nobody. He is an old man in custody, in a legal proceeding, without support. And what he says happened is that the standing was done by Somebody else, and out of that standing the preaching was fully known.

Nobody in that account was impressed by Paul's posture.

You have the Lord standing with you, and His standing has never once depended on yours. That is what the written word says over you and not a soft framing chosen for a woman in a chair by a door, and the Holy Spirit who has been with you through thirty years of hall floors is the evidence that the ministry has not been downgraded.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic just before the apology. If the standing is His, then a chair by a door is information about two hips and a heart thing that a doctor is managing. It is not a lesser kind of praying, and it never had the standing to become that.

The apology is not humility

Here is the second thing, and it is the one that matters most.

I am sorry, love, I have to sit. That sentence is not modesty and it is not consideration. It is you getting there first. If you name it before they can, then nobody has to feel awkward, and you keep control of a room that used to be yours to move around in.

And the cost of it is that every person who comes to that chair receives an apology before they receive anything else. That is what they are being handed at the start.

You have been carried through every one of the years since the hips, and the carrying was never adjusted for what you can no longer do. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit doing the work through you in that chair rather than assessing whether you are on your feet.

And nothing here promises the hips improve, or that you get back to the front, or that this is temporary. Nobody on this page knows that, and it is not the sort of promise anybody should be handing out.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a warm thought in a plastic chair. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a person has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Out loud. Not apologized for first. And the thing in the way is not the hips and it is not the woman who knelt. It is a sentence: praying from a chair is a lesser kind of praying. Nobody has ever answered that out loud, and you least of all.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a woman with any authority sitting by a door. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in the three hours you used to manage.

If this has taken you somewhere darker than frustration, and there are hours when you would rather not be here at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.