The Deckchair I Did Not Lean Back In

The deckchairs had been in the shed since before it all started, folded flat behind the mower with the striped canvas gone soft.

Her son-in-law got them out on the Sunday. Wiped the frames with a cloth, worked out which way up they went, put them in the long grass at the top end where the light stays latest.

It was a completely good afternoon. Somebody had cut grass two gardens over and the whole street smelled of it. The children were doing something involved with a bucket. There was a plate going round. Her daughter told a story about a car park in Wales that everybody had heard before and everybody laughed at anyway. The sun came round off the back of the house at about four and sat on the top end of the garden until nearly six.

Three and a half hours. Nothing went wrong in any of them.

And Ruth sat on the front three inches of that deckchair for the whole of it.

She never leaned back. Not once. The canvas behind her shoulders never touched her shoulders. She made a pot of tea, carried a cup out, set it down in the grass by the chair leg and never drank a mouthful of it, and at the end of the afternoon she picked it up cold with a bit of grass floating in it and poured it down the sink.

She could not have told you what she was waiting for. That is the part she has not been able to say out loud to anybody. Not a thing in particular. It was more that some part of her still had one ear out, the way it had for two years, listening for whatever it is that ends an afternoon. Nothing ended it. It got to six and people packed the bucket away and kissed her and went home.

She washed up. And standing at the sink she realized she could not tell you a single specific thing about those three and a half hours, except the exact feeling of the front edge of the chair against the backs of her legs.

She is not sad. That is what makes it so hard to explain. She had a good afternoon. She just was not in it.

Where the joy is actually kept

Let me say the honest thing first, because the dishonest version of this message is very popular and it does not survive contact with a real Sunday.

Good afternoons end. All of them. That is not pessimism, it is simply what an afternoon is, and the part of you that stayed on the front edge of the chair is not stupid and it is not faithless. It has spent two years learning that things end, and it learned it the hard way, and it is applying the lesson exactly where it was taught.

So nobody is going to talk you out of it by insisting the good will keep coming. That sentence is not mine to write and it is not in the psalm either.

Psalm 16:11 does something better and stranger. It does not forecast the weather. It gives an address.

You make known to me the path of life. In Your presence there is fullness of joy. At Your right hand there are pleasures forever.Psalm 16:11

Read where the joy is put. Not in the season. Not in the afternoon, not in the deckchair, not in the arrangement of people in a garden. Fullness of joy is located in a Presence, and the only thing in that verse described as lasting forever is what sits at His right hand.

That is not me being nice about your Sunday. That is the Spirit of God laying Psalm 16:11 down in front of a woman on the front three inches of a chair and saying: the thing you are guarding is not in this garden and it never was. You are not defending the joy by staying tense. You are guarding a cupboard that God never kept it in.

You have been told, by kind people, to make the most of it while it lasts. Scripture says nothing of the kind, and the difference matters more than it sounds: making the most of a thing that is ending is still a job, and it puts you in charge of squeezing a Sunday for everything it has. What the written word offers instead is a place where the fullness is already held, and the Holy Spirit is the one moving that from an idea into the muscles across your shoulders.

The word in that line is presence, and presence is a location before it is a feeling. Somewhere is where God is. The Spirit is not asking you to enjoy harder, and He is not grading your afternoon. He is telling you which garden you were actually sitting in, and whose it was.

Psalm 16 opens with a man asking to be kept safe, and by the end of it he is describing pleasures at God's right hand that do not run out. Nothing improved in his circumstances between the first line and the last. The location of the joy is what changed hands. His Spirit does that same work in a body that has been braced since February, and you have not been asked to earn one inch of it.

And I cannot promise you another Sunday like that one. I would not try, and I would not believe anybody who did. Psalm 16 makes no such promise, which is exactly why it can be leaned on: it puts the unending thing somewhere that an autumn cannot reach it, and His Spirit is the one who makes that land at a kitchen sink with a cold cup in your hand.