The Folding Chair With the Label Still On

There is a folding chair leaning against the shed wall in Emilio's garden, and the cardboard label is still looped round the arm of it on a little plastic tie.

His wife brought it home in April. Canvas seat, wooden arms, the sort that opens with one hand. She put it out on the grass the first warm evening and it stayed out for three days and then it rained, and he carried it into the shed, and when the weather turned again he brought it out and leaned it against the wall, and there it has been since.

Nobody has sat in it. Not once. Not him, anyway.

Now, the third Saturday in June.

Nothing on. That is the whole problem and it is worth saying slowly: nothing on. No fixture, because the league had finished. Nobody coming. Both girls out with their cousins from ten. Weather like a postcard from about seven in the morning.

His wife said it at the kitchen counter while the kettle was going. We have got absolutely nothing on today.

By twenty past seven he had opened the shift app and taken a six hour at the depot.

He did not think about it. That is the part he keeps coming back to. There was no weighing up, no decision he could describe afterwards, no moment where he chose the depot over the garden. She said we have got nothing on, and something in him went and found something on, the way a hand goes out when you trip.

He told her it was the overtime.

It was not the overtime. The nights finished in January, the thing that needed covering stopped needing covering, and he has not touched a compulsory shift since. Those six hours were voluntary and he knows exactly how voluntary they were, which is why he did not look at her when he said it.

Here is a detail he has never told anybody, and it is the one that gives the whole thing away.

He can sit down at work. He gets to the depot twenty minutes early and he sits in the cab in bay four with the window down and the radio off and he is completely fine. Still. Content, even. Twenty minutes of doing nothing at all, and not one twitch in him.

It is his own garden he cannot sit down in.

Because at work, sitting still is a gap between two jobs. It has a shape and an end and something on either side of it. In his garden on a free Saturday, sitting still is just sitting still, and there is nothing on either side of it, and the moment he lowers himself into that chair he is completely undefended.

That is the sentence he would never say out loud. Sitting down is the position I am in when it comes.

And here is where I stop talking about Emilio, because you already know whether that is your garden.

Maybe it is not a chair. Maybe it is that you keep the phone in your hand at your own table, or that you have not booked anything more than nine days out since the spring, or that when things go well for a fortnight you find yourself checking on people, twice, for no reason.

Things are alright. That is what is frightening.

Taste is not a thing you can do at arm's length

There is one line I want to put in your hands, and both halves of it matter, which is the bit almost everybody drops.

Taste and see that the Lord is good; how fortunate is the one who takes shelter in Him.Psalm 34:8

Take Psalm 34:8 and read the first word on its own. Taste. Not admire, not acknowledge, not agree that it is good in principle from a safe distance across the garden. Taste is the one sense in all of them that cannot be done at arm's length, because it requires the thing to be brought all the way in, and the Holy Spirit picked that verb for a man standing in a doorway holding a phone. You have permission to bring a good Saturday all the way in.

Now the second half, and this is the half that makes it safe. In the very same breath, the very same sentence, the psalm says shelter. Refuge. The word you need when the weather comes. David does not say taste the good because the good is going to keep coming; he says taste the good, and take shelter in Him, and the Spirit holds those two together so tightly that you cannot pick up one and leave the other on the ground.

Do you see what that does to the other shoe?

Psalm 34 never promises you the Saturday. Read it twice and it still does not, and I am not going to improve on it for you, because a promise God did not make is no shelter at all when the phone goes. What the verse promises is the shelter, which is exactly what a man wants in the hand he is keeping free, and the Holy Spirit is the one pressing that difference into you. You have a refuge in Psalm 34:8 that does not rise and fall with your week, and you have a good day in front of you that is genuinely good.

And look who wrote it. Four verses earlier the same man says he sought the Lord and was answered, and delivered from all his terrors. Psalm 34:4. This is not a line from somebody with a comfortable life explaining goodness to you from a deckchair. It is a man just out of the dark saying taste it, and the Spirit put his testimony there so a braced man would take the instruction from someone who has been braced.

Not my permission, then. Not my read of your June. David wrote it down and Psalm 34 has been standing in your garden all summer, and His Spirit is the one making it land on a Saturday you were planning to fill.

Nothing here calls the bracing a failure, by the way. You learned it. You learned it in a season when relaxing had a real cost, and it kept the show on the road, and there is no scolding in this message and none in that psalm either.

And if the second job is still running, if the app is still your Sunday night and the hours are not optional yet, then take this in the cab and not on the far side of it. David wrote Psalm 34 out of the middle of his own terrors and not from a garden, and the Holy Spirit reads it over a man still on the rota in the same voice He uses over a man off it. You are invited to taste something good this week whether or not the week is anything like clear.