The Chair in the Corridor

Sami has learned which chair in the corridor is the one.

Not the one nearest the door, because the door goes in and out all morning. Not the one under the window, because the sun comes round at eleven and cooks you. The third one along, with the arm that has been mended with tape, where you can see the corridor both ways and nobody has to squeeze past your knees.

He has driven his neighbor to every appointment for a year and two months. He knows the route with the two left turns that skip the lights. He knows where to park so the walk in is shortest. He knows to bring the flask, because the machine at the end takes the coins and thinks about it and then keeps them.

And then he sits. That is his job. The other man goes through the door and Sami sits in the third chair with his hands between his knees, and he reads the same folded page of the newspaper he has read four times, and mostly he does not read it at all. He watches a cleaner mop from one end to the other. He works out how many tiles there are between his shoes and the wall.

He prays, in a way. He has never been sure it counts. It is not words so much as a sort of leaning in the direction of the door.

And lately something has started up in him that he does not say to anybody. That the sitting is all he has got. That a year and two months of a man sitting in a chair is not, in the end, very much. That somewhere there is presumably a person who would know what to say, and how to say it, and he is not that person, and his neighbor got him instead.

The door opens. He is on his feet before he has decided to be.

That is you, perhaps. Third chair along, hands between your knees, doing the only thing you know how to do and quietly certain it is not enough.

Three words in a corridor

Let me get one thing out of the way before anything else, because it has probably already been done to you.

The result is not on you. It is not on the quality of your praying, the length of it, the words you found or the words you did not. Nobody has ever bought an outcome for another person's body with effort, and any teaching that hints otherwise has just made you the reason, which is the cruelest thing you can do to a man in a corridor. Nobody failed to have enough faith here. That sentence is not in the book, and I will not put it in your chair with you.

Now. There is a woman in Matthew 15 who came for somebody else. Her daughter was in trouble and she came, and she kept coming, and the disciples asked for her to be sent away because she was making noise. And then this happens, and it is one short verse, and it is one of the strongest things in the gospels.

Then came she and worshipped him, saying, Lord, help me.Matthew 15:25

Look at what she says. Not help her. Help me.

She has come entirely for her daughter. Her whole errand is somebody else's body. And the sentence that leaves her mouth on her knees is three words about herself, because a person carrying another person is a person who needs help, and Jesus did not correct her grammar.

You are permitted to ask for yourself in the middle of asking for him, and it takes nothing away from him. Matthew 15:25 is the ground under that, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an old written line stand up in a corridor with a taped chair arm in it.

What the sitting actually is

Now look at the first half of the verse, because the church usually quotes the second half and leaves the better part behind. Then came she and worshipped him.

She came, and then she was down, and then she spoke. Three words. Not a speech. Not an argument constructed the night before. She did not talk longer than the disciples and win on volume. What the text records is a woman getting herself into the presence of Jesus and saying the shortest sentence in the chapter.

That is what your leaning in the direction of the door has been. It is not a lesser form of prayer that a more articulate person would upgrade. It is the thing itself.

You have been praying for a year and two months, and it counted every single time, whether or not words came. What is written in Matthew 15:25 puts the weight on coming rather than on eloquence, and the Spirit of God has never once graded a man on his vocabulary in a hallway.

And here is where I want to be exact, because the lie that gets into carers is very specific. It is not usually "you did not pray enough". It is quieter than that. It is "a better man would have known what to say". That one gets under the door because it feels humble. It is not humble. It is an accusation wearing a modest coat, and it always arrives on the days you are most tired.

You were the one who showed up, and no better man was ever the plan. The word says she came and worshipped and asked, and the Holy Spirit has been in that corridor with you since the first appointment, which is not something I hope for you but something Scripture holds out to everybody who comes.