The Four Chairs in My Own House

For two years the week had a spine, and the spine was Tuesday.

Everything hung off it. The shopping happened on Monday because of Tuesday. The washing went on Wednesday because Tuesday was gone by then and she could not have faced it before. Friday was for phone calls, because by Friday she knew what to tell people.

And at ten past two on a Tuesday she was in a particular chair.

Not a chair in general. That one, third along, with the arm that had been mended with the wrong color vinyl, by the window that looked out on a flat roof where a seagull stood most weeks like it had also been given an appointment. She could have drawn it. She could still draw it.

There is no Tuesday now.

So she moves. That is the honest description of her day and she has never said it to anybody. The kitchen table at half eight with the laptop. The sofa by about ten, sideways, with her legs up. The small back bedroom that was going to be an office and has a chair in it and a lamp and nothing else, for forty minutes, until the room starts to feel like a waiting area. Then back to the kitchen table but the far end of it, because the near end has gone stale.

Four chairs. Some days five. She has not sat down twice in the same place since June.

She is not in trouble. She would want that said plainly, and she says it to herself several times a week in exactly those words. Nobody is worried about her. The bills are paid, the house is warm, she is perfectly well and the letter said what it said. She simply could not tell you, if you rang her at four in the afternoon and asked, where she has actually been all day.

There is a list, of course there is. On the back of an envelope, in the drawer with the batteries. Things I could do now. Six of them, written on three separate evenings, and she has not started one.

And the reason is not laziness, which is what she assumes anybody else would think. The reason is that every item on that envelope is an answer to a question nobody has asked her, and she can feel that while she is writing the next one down.

That is you, is it not.

Perhaps your Tuesday was a Thursday, or a night shift, or a ward round, or the forty minute drive that gave the day a shape whether you wanted one or not. Nothing has gone wrong. That is what makes it so difficult to raise. You would sound ungrateful, and you are not ungrateful, you are just a person who used to have a place at ten past two and now has a house with several rooms in it and no idea which one she lives in.

Behind you and in front of you

I am not going to help you with the envelope.

I could. It would be the natural thing to do and you would probably be polite about it. But six suggestions from me would only be a seventh, eighth and ninth answer to the question nobody asked, and I think you've had enough of those from people who love you and want you to be getting on with something.

So let me take the question away instead, because I do not think you are drifting. I think you have been given a standing you have not been told about.

Count the verbs in Psalm 139:5, because every single one of them belongs to God. He hedged. He laid. There is not one thing in that sentence for the psalmist to organize, and you are already inside the result of it rather than working towards it. The Spirit is putting a very old line down in the middle of a house where a woman has moved four times before lunch.

You have hedged me behind and before, and laid Your hand upon me.Psalm 139:5

Behind and before. Those are the two directions a person feels loose in, and He names them both.

Behind is the two years. Everything that happened, in whatever order it happened, including the parts you cannot account for. Before is the bit that is worrying you now, the open ground with no Tuesday in it. David says God has hedged both. A hedge is a boundary somebody else puts in. You do not hedge yourself, you come out one morning and find the line has been drawn round you, and the Spirit is not asking you to draw it. It is written that He already has.

Now notice what is not in that verse, because with you it matters more than what is.

There is no instruction. Nowhere is David told to choose a direction, set an intention, or make better use of his week. The word gives him a position and stops. So I have no plan to hand you and Psalm 139 is not withholding one either, and the Spirit is not standing behind you with the envelope waiting to see what you write on it. You are placed, and placed is not a task.

I know what your mind does with that, because it is the same thing mine does. It says: yes, but I still have to decide something eventually. Perhaps you decide something in a month, or in a year, and it is fine, and it is still not the thing that makes you somebody with an address. Being planted is a standing, not a strategy. It is the difference between a tree being in a garden and a tree working out how to be in a garden, and only one of those is a real activity.

Then the verse ends with a hand.

And laid Your hand upon me. Read it as a weight rather than a push, because that is what a laid hand is. Nobody lays a hand on somebody to move them along. It is the gesture you make when you want a person to know where they are and that you are there, and the Spirit has been doing exactly that to you through this written line while you have been treating your own week as evidence of a problem. You have His hand on you in the small back bedroom, in the forty minutes, at the wrong end of the kitchen table.

I want to be careful about one thing before we go on. Nothing here is a reason to stop anything a doctor has told you to keep doing, and if something worries you, ring them. This is not about your body. It is about a woman who is well, and free, and cannot find the place she is standing in.