Nothing Is Wrong And I Cannot Sit Down

She is drying the same plate.

It has been dry for a while. She knows it has been dry, in the way you know something without stopping doing it, and the tea towel keeps going round because the alternative is to put the plate away, and then there is nothing left in the sink, and then she has to decide what to do with a Saturday morning in which nothing is wrong.

The radio is on low. Somebody upstairs is playing music through a wall. The window over the sink has that particular thin gold light you get around ten, and outside it a bird is doing something ridiculous in the guttering.

It is a good morning. That is the whole difficulty.

Eighteen months ago her mornings were not like this. Eighteen months ago there was a hospital car park and a rota on the fridge and a phone that she carried into the bathroom, and she got very, very good at it. She could hold a whole day in her head. She could hear a change in a breath from another room.

That is over. The rota came down. The car park does not exist for her anymore. And every single morning since, she has stood up in the kitchen with her shoulders somewhere near her ears, waiting.

Because here is the thing nobody warns you about. A body that has learned to be ready does not stop being ready when the reason stops. It keeps the post. It stands at the sink. It finds a plate.

Her sister asked her a few weeks ago what she does at the weekend now, and she said, honestly, I tidy. And her sister laughed, and she laughed, and then in the car she thought about it for eleven miles.

She has not sat down. Not properly. Not in the chair by the window with a cup of coffee and nothing in her hands and nothing owed to anybody for two hours. She has sat down to work. She has sat down to wait. She has not sat down to enjoy anything since before the rota went up on the fridge, and she is not entirely sure she is allowed to.

That is the chair I want to talk about. One chair. One morning.

The man who had to learn the good half

There is a letter written from a prison cell by a man who had been through more genuinely terrible weeks than most people reading this, and in the middle of it he says something that gets quoted at people in hard times and almost never in good ones.

I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need.Philippians 4:12

Look at what he says he had to learn.

Not just hunger. Plenty. He puts them in the same sentence, as two skills, and he says he had to be taught both. Which means that somewhere in that man's life there was a period where he was fed and safe and warm and it was awkward, and he had to learn how to be there without flinching, exactly the way he had to learn how to be hungry without panicking.

Nobody ever tells you that the good half is a learned thing. We assume plenty comes naturally and hardship is the hard part. He did not find that. He found that a person who has become an expert at the low can stand in the high holding a plate they have already dried.

And notice what he is not saying. He is not saying the plenty is permanent. He is not saying he has been promised a run of good mornings and can therefore relax. He says he has learned the secret of facing both, which means his footing is not underneath the circumstances at all. It is underneath him. It is the same footing in either one.

That is the sentence I want to put under your chair.

Philippians 4:12 has a man saying he has been instructed in both, and the Holy Spirit is the one giving that instruction to somebody who only ever got to practice the hard half. The reason you cannot sit down is that sitting down feels like a bet. If you settle into this morning, you are wagering something. You are letting your guard down and if the phone rings you will be caught out in the open, undefended, having been happy, and the drop from happy is further than the drop from braced. Your body has done the arithmetic and decided that standing up costs less.

I understand the arithmetic. It is wrong, but not because you are foolish. It is wrong because it assumes the thing holding you is your readiness. It never was. Through the whole hospital car park season, the thing holding you was not your vigilance, and the proof of that is simple: you slept, sometimes, and the world did not end while you were asleep.

If He held you in the low without your permission, He is holding you in the high without your posture. Philippians 4:12 is Paul saying he learned both, abased and abounding, from the same source, and the Holy Spirit is the one who teaches the second half to a person who only ever practiced the first. You do not have to guard a good morning into staying. You are not the load-bearing wall.

And I am not going to promise you that nothing hard is coming, because I do not know and nobody who tells you otherwise knows either. What I can tell you is what Paul actually found, which is that the same arms are underneath both rooms. That is not a smaller comfort than a promise of good weather. It is a much larger one, because weather changes and arms do not.