The Chair They Pulled Out for Me

Maureen put a cushion on the chair because that chair had a broken slat, and she did not want Chidinma sitting on a broken slat at her own party.

That is the level of thought that went into it. Three women off the same street, a borrowed trestle table down the middle of a back garden, a cloth that did not quite reach the ends, jam jars with tealights in them because Halima had seen it somewhere and had been waiting years for an excuse.

Twenty two people. Rice, jollof and a tray of something Pete had made and would not name. Somebody's speaker on a windowsill.

It was Chidinma's fortieth, and the chair at the head of the table, with the cushion on it, was pulled out for her at ten past six.

At ten o'clock it was still pulled out.

She did not sit in it once. Not once, in four hours, at a meal three women had spent a fortnight organizing for her.

She carried. She topped up. She took the empty dishes in and came back with full ones. She found the kitchen roll. She stood at the hatch of Maureen's kitchen window and did about forty minutes of washing up that nobody on this earth had asked her to do, with a tea towel over her shoulder and the party going on behind her back.

Six or seven times somebody said sit down, Chi.

Six or seven times she said in a minute.

At half nine they sang, and she stood at the corner of the table with the tea towel still on her shoulder and her hands full of somebody's plate, smiling, thanking everybody, and standing.

She went home at eleven and put the kettle on and sat in her own kitchen and thought about that empty chair with the cushion on it, and something in her chest went tight in a way she has no words for.

Because she knows what it is. She knows exactly what it is and she has never said it to anybody.

If she sits down, she is being given something. And a woman who is being given something is a woman at the center of a room, and a woman at the center of a room is a woman being looked at, and Chidinma learned somewhere, over a long time, that being looked at is the beginning of being weighed.

On her feet with a serving spoon she is useful. Useful is a position she understands. Useful cannot be taken off her and nobody sends a bill for it.

The chair is the dangerous thing. The chair is where you sit and enjoy something and then find out later what it cost.

The one thing the son is never asked to do

Look at what actually happens in the most famous homecoming in Scripture, and look at it as a piece of choreography rather than a sermon.

And bring the fattened calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found. And they began to celebrate.Luke 15:23 to 24

Luke 15:23 is three commands and every one of them lands on somebody other than the son. Bring the calf. Kill it. Let us eat and celebrate. Nowhere in that sentence is the boy asked to help carry it, serve at it, or stay on his feet during it, and the Spirit of God has been pressing that order of events into you for longer than you have noticed.

He came up that road with a speech prepared. He had worked out what he would offer, which was to be taken on as a hired man, because being useful is a position a person understands and being a son is not. The father does not appear to hear the speech. He talks straight over it to the servants about a robe and a ring and a calf.

That is not the neighbors' opinion of you and it is not mine. It is what the Holy Spirit has been saying through Luke 15:24 since long before anybody borrowed a trestle table: you are alive and you are found, and the celebrating in that verse is not a reward with a review attached to the end of it.

What the welcome costs, and who pays it

Somebody trained you, over a long time and probably without meaning to, to believe that being served puts a person in debt. That a welcome is an advance on something. That if you enjoy the evening you will be paying for it in some currency by the autumn.

Scripture never once prices a welcome. What is written in Luke 15 is that the father ran, and that the whole cost of the celebration came out of the father's own yard, off the father's own herd, on the father's own instruction. You have been handed something that was paid for at the other end, and the Spirit of God is the one carrying that fact to a woman standing at a kitchen hatch with a tea towel on her shoulder.

And there is a second son in that story, standing outside in the field, who will not come in while the music is going.

Read what the father does about it in Luke 15:28. He does not send a servant. He does not let him stand out there and learn something. His father came out and was pleading with him. You have a God who leaves a lit room and comes out into the dark to stand next to the one who cannot make herself go in, and His Spirit is doing that in a back garden at half past nine.

I have no standing to tell you it is safe to sit down. Luke 15:31 has that standing: Child, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. You are not in debt in that garden, you were not in debt when the chair was pulled out, and the Spirit is the one making that sentence land rather than the sound of me saying it.