Somebody Was in My Seat

He gets there at ten to. Not on the hour, not at quarter past. Ten to, because ten to is the window where the doors are open and the urn is on and a man can put his coat over the back of a chair and go and be sociable in the certain knowledge that the chair is spoken for. The coat is the flag. Everybody in that building understands the coat.

The chair is the third from the end on the left, halfway back, under the second window. He has sat in it for eleven years. He knows the radiator behind it ticks in January, and that the light comes across it at about twenty past in the summer, and that when the sound is too loud he can lean a quarter turn to the right and it sorts itself out. He did not choose it for any of that. He sat in it once, and then he sat in it again, and that was the whole of the decision.

And then one Sunday there is a family in it.

They are lovely. That is the first thing to say and by rights it ought to be the only thing that matters. A young couple with a baby and a changing bag the size of a small dog, and they have taken the third chair from the end and the two beside it, and the mother is doing that slow bouncing thing with her knee, and not one of them has the faintest idea, because how could they, that they are sitting in eleven years.

So he does the lap.

Everybody knows the lap. It goes first to the notice board, which he reads carefully, although he wrote half of it. Then to the table where the hymn books are, and he picks one up, although he has not needed one since about the third year. Then a slow arc down the far side with the expression of a man looking for somebody in particular, which he is not. Then he sits down four rows back on the wrong side with a hymn book he does not need, and sings the first song at about sixty percent.

And here is the part that would never fit in a strip, because there is nothing funny in it at all. He is upset. Genuinely, disproportionately upset, in a way he would not admit to a single living person, over a chair that cost eleven pounds and belongs to the church.

You know that feeling. Maybe yours is not a chair. Maybe it is the mug at the back of the cupboard with the chip in the handle, or the parking space that is not a space, or the two minutes at the end when one particular person always finds you, and the week they did not, something went quietly wrong with your whole afternoon. Whatever your version is, you know the size of the reaction and you know it does not match the size of the thing, and you have never once said so out loud, because saying it out loud would make you sound like a small man over a chair.

You are not a small man over a chair. Let me tell you what actually happened.

What eleven years does to a chair

A chair stops being furniture somewhere around the second year, and after that it is a witness.

It was underneath a man the Sunday the results came back wrong. It held him up through the winter his mother went. It is where he sat the first time he prayed with his eyes open and meant it, and where he sat again the week after, half hoping the thing would work twice. None of that is written on the chair. All of it is written into the man, and the chair is simply the place where the writing happened.

So when a family sits down in it, nothing whatever is stolen, and something is genuinely lost, and both of those are true at the same time. What surfaces in the car park afterwards is not ownership. It is the sudden knowledge of how badly a person needs one square meter of the world to be reliable, and how thin that reliability turned out to be.

You are not petty, and what happened in that car park is not pettiness. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, and nowhere in it does He set a minimum size on what is permitted to break one. The Holy Spirit does not triage. He came for the eleven years and He came for the eleven pounds, and He is not embarrassed by either.

The reason the reaction outsizes the thing is that the chair had been doing a job nobody ever assigned it. Belonging is not a feeling that arrives once and then stays put. In a room of a hundred people it gets renewed weekly, and most of us renew it with objects: a chair, a mug, a slot on the rota, the same three faces near the door. Those things end up load bearing, and not one of them was ever built to bear a load. Take one away and the whole frame shifts.

You have a standing in that house that nobody can sit down in. The written word puts it flatly: no more a stranger and a foreigner, but a fellowcitizen with the saints and of the household of God. A citizen does not keep his citizenship in a chair, and the Spirit is the one who countersigned it, not the family who happened to arrive at nine.

Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, even thine altars, O LORD of hosts, my King, and my God.Psalm 84:3

The sparrow did not own the ledge

Read that again and notice carefully who owns what.

The house is His. The altars are His. The nest is hers, and she built it herself out of whatever was lying about the yard, and she put it where she put it because the safest structure in the county happened to be standing right there. Nobody deeded her that ledge. She was not on any list and she did not get there at ten to. She simply found that the God of hosts keeps a house where a small bird can raise her young without being moved on.

That is the order of things, and getting it the wrong way round is exactly what makes a Sunday morning hurt more than it should. The nest is real. The nest was never the security. The security is the roof over the nest, and the roof has not been up for discussion since the day it went on.

You were set in that body by Someone who was pleased to do it. Scripture says God set the members every one of them in the body as it hath pleased Him, which makes the placing a pleasure and not a vacancy that came up at short notice. The Holy Spirit did the setting, and nothing that happens at ten to nine on a Sunday morning is a review of it.

And then there is the family in the third chair, and the true thing about them is also the kindest thing. They took nothing. They came in with a baby and a bag and sat in the first three seats they could reach together, which is the entire extent of it. If that room is any good at all, in five years the baby will be standing on that very chair during the last song while somebody two rows back is quietly delighted about it. That is what a chair is for.

You have room in you for the loss and the gladness at once, and there is no rule that says you must have them sorted by lunchtime. Scripture never asks a man to pretend a thing away before he is honest about it: cast your care upon Him, it says, and casting is something a man does with a weight he is actually holding. The Spirit is not standing off waiting for you to tidy the feeling up first.