The Chair I Stopped Sitting In

He eats standing up now. Nobody has said anything about it, which is its own kind of loud.

Counter, plate, back to the room. He is quick about it and he makes it look like efficiency, like a man who has something to get on with, and he has nothing to get on with and everybody in that house knows it.

The chair is still there. Nobody moved it. It is the one on the left at the end, the one with the arm that came loose in about 2019 and that he glued and clamped and that has held ever since.

Five months.

The work went in a way that nobody could argue with. The contract was not renewed, and the reason was in a paragraph about the sector rather than a paragraph about him, and two other men went the same week. His wife earns. They are not in trouble in the way people mean when they say trouble. There is enough.

That is somehow worse. If they were desperate he would have something to be. Instead there is enough, and there is a chair, and there is a man standing at a counter.

The sentence has been there since about week three and it never says itself in words as clean as these, but underneath, this is what it is: a man sits at that table because he brought something to it, and I have stopped bringing anything.

You know that sentence. It might be a chair, or a seat in a meeting, or the head of a family conversation you have gone quiet in. Somewhere you have quietly demoted yourself, without telling anybody, over something that was never a moral event.

Who does the raising, and out of what

There is a psalm about God's habit of putting people in the wrong place according to everybody watching.

He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth the needy out of the dunghill; that he may set him with princes, even with the princes of his people.Psalm 113:7

Read where the man in that verse starts. Not in a slightly reduced position. In the dust, on the ash heap, which is where a person sat in that world when everything that gave him standing was gone. And read what he does about it: nothing. Not one verb in the sentence belongs to him. He is raised, he is lifted, he is set.

And notice where he gets set. Not back on his feet at a respectful distance. With princes. At the table.

You are a man God raises and sets at a table, and He does the raising and He does the setting. That is what the written word says over you and not a warm thing invented to get a man through a bad five months, and the Holy Spirit who is with you at that counter is the evidence that your place has never been assigned on the basis of what you carry in.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic you have been doing standing up. If the raising is His, then five months is information about a sector, a contract and a paragraph written by somebody who has never met you. It is not information about your place in your own house, and it never had the standing to become that.

Your chair was never invoiced

Here is the second thing, and it is the splinter.

The belief underneath the standing up is that a seat at a table is a thing a man pays for, monthly, in what he brings home. Nobody in your family taught you that. Nobody in that room believes it. You would be furious if anybody said it about your father or your son.

But it is running, and it has been running for five months, and it has changed where you eat.

You have been carried through every one of those months, and the carrying did not become conditional when the contract did. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit doing that work in you rather than checking whether you have brought anything home this week.

There is something worth saying plainly, because this is exactly where a message like this could turn into a push and it will not. Nothing here is telling you to go and get work, or to be more positive about the search, or to think of this as an opportunity. Those are other people's sentences and most of them have never been where you are standing. Whether anything comes next month or does not, your place in that room does not move.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a comforting thought at a kitchen counter. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a man has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Spoken. Not carried around a kitchen with a plate in your hand. And the thing in the way is not the sector and it is not the contract. It is a sentence: I have stopped bringing anything. 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 man with any authority eating standing up. Scripture gives the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how much of yourself was behind them.

If these months have taken you somewhere darker than shame, 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.