Coming Back To The Hour You Left

Thirty one years in that chair, at twenty past seven, morning and evening.

She could tell you what the light does in that corner in February. She knew the page by its feel. She had a way of setting the cup down on the left hand side that was not deliberate and had simply happened over three decades, and if you had moved that chair eight inches she would have known.

She has not sat in it since the winter before last.

There was no decision. There was a hard thing, and then a harder thing on top of it, and for about a fortnight she did not have it in her, which was fine, and then the fortnight became a month, and at some point in the spring she realized she had stopped, and by then stopping had become the situation rather than the interruption.

The chair is still there. Nobody sits in it. Her granddaughter put a folded blanket on it in October and she has not moved the blanket.

Here is where it has got to now, and she is too honest a woman to pretend otherwise. She wants to go back. She has wanted to go back since about April.

And she cannot make herself sit down, because in her head sitting down means beginning with an account. Eighteen months. Where she went, and why, and what it says about a woman who kept a thing for thirty one years and let it go over a bad winter, and whether she is going to be able to keep it now or whether she will let it go again, which she would rather not find out.

So she stands in the doorway of that room about twice a week, at twenty past seven, and looks at a chair with a blanket on it, and goes and does something in the kitchen.

The watchman did not earn the morning

Come and stand in the doorway with me, because the psalm that says the truest thing about waiting says it without one word about deserving.

My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning.Psalm 130:6

Think about the watchman in that line.

He is at the end of the night. He is cold, and he has been on his feet for hours, and the whole of his longing is pointed at one thing, and here is what is true about that thing: he does not produce it. Nothing he does hastens it by one minute. The morning arrives on its own account, on time, and it does not consult his record.

That is what she is waiting for, says the psalmist. Something that comes because it comes.

Hear this in the doorway. You are not standing outside a room you have to be readmitted to. The written word puts a waiting soul beside a watchman who cannot earn a sunrise, and the Holy Spirit is already sitting in that room at twenty past seven and has been through every one of the eighteen months.

Now the account you think you owe. Let me say something plain about it, because it is not humility, though it is wearing humility's coat.

An account is what you give to somebody who was inconvenienced by your absence. It assumes the hour was a duty owed to a person who noticed you were not there and formed a view. The Holy Spirit has never once taken that view of anybody.

But look at what actually happened over that winter. A woman was flattened by two hard things and did not have it in her for a fortnight, and what is written says He knows our frame and remembers we are dust, and there is no verse anywhere that turns a bad winter into a debt.

Hear this too, and let it get all the way in. You have not been dismissed from a post, and Scripture is what settles that. What is written says His mercies are new every morning, which means there is no ledger running, and the Spirit of God has not spent eighteen months waiting for an explanation, because He has never once required one from anybody.

And now the thing about the second half of your life, because there is one and I do not want you to miss it.

The reason you cannot sit down is that you are afraid of finding out whether it will hold. That is a real fear and it is worth naming: you would rather stand in the doorway than sit down and discover in six weeks that you are a woman who could not get it back. Nothing written in Scripture makes tomorrow the price of tonight, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting to see whether you last.

But the hour was never a demonstration. It was never proof of anything about you, not in year three and not in year thirty. It is a bell that rings, and you go and sit in a chair, and whether you are there tomorrow is tomorrow's business, and the written word never made it anything else.

Thirty one years in that chair was not an achievement you have now damaged. It was thirty one years of being met, and the One doing the meeting is still in that room, because the Holy Spirit does not vacate a place when a tired woman stops coming.