The Last Chair on the Stack

The rack holds forty chairs and he is sliding the last one on, and the far end of the hallway has already gone dark because the lights are on a timer.

Wednesday night, a small church on a county road, the kind with a coffee urn that has to be unplugged by hand and a boiler that ticks for twenty minutes after it shuts off. Everybody has gone. Somebody left a kid's jacket on the radiator, so he hangs it on the door handle where it will get found. The last chair claps flat against the others. He pushes the rack to the wall where it lives.

In his coat there is a small notebook, spiral at the top. In it are names. He writes one down every time he prays with somebody, because he forgets otherwise and he does not want to forget. Forty this year. A man in the parking lot with his hand shaking on the truck door. A woman after the service who would not sit down. Two on the phone, late. A kid in the church kitchen who asked him to and then laughed and then stopped laughing. Forty times a hand on a shoulder, and forty times he said out loud what God says.

He stands at the dark end of the hallway with his keys already in his hand and does the thing he almost never does, which is nothing at all. Just stands there. And it lands on him, quietly and all at once, that in the same twelve months, in the same body, with the same voice, he has never once put his own hand on himself and said a single word.

Not one. He could recite what he has been told about the part of his body that concerns him the way you recite a phone number you have had since you were a kid. He has never said anything back to it.

That is you, perhaps, in your own emptied room, holding keys, with a hand that has been useful to everybody. You have said the word over other people and meant every syllable of it. And your own body has been standing in the hallway all year, unaddressed, like a chair nobody thought to stack.

The forty names in the notebook

Let me say the first thing plainly, because I know how this can be heard and I refuse to let it be heard that way. Nothing about that notebook is a failing. There is nothing in it to be sorry for. Every name in it is a person you believed God for, and you did not hesitate on a single one of them, and you did not run a background check on whether they had earned it first.

So watch what you did not do. You never once looked at a woman in a parking lot and thought, well, we should see about her doubt first. You never took a man's history into account before you opened your mouth. You did the very opposite. You put your hand on a shoulder and you said what God says, because you believed that what God says is bigger than the person standing there, and you were right.

And then you walked past yourself for twelve months.

You are not a different category of person from the forty in that notebook, and you were never the exception you have quietly been treating yourself as. In John 6:63 Jesus says the words He speaks are spirit and they are life, and He does not attach a list of who they are life to and who they are only a nice idea for. The Holy Spirit is the one who carries those words into a room, and He has not been driving past your address on His way to everybody else's.

It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life.John 6:63

Read that as a sentence about what a word actually is. Not advice. Not encouragement, which is a kind word for the thing we say when we have nothing else. Spirit, and life. Something that carries the life of the One who said it into the place where it lands.

Right now, as you read, the word you have been carrying for other people is standing over your own body. That is not my opinion of you. Psalm 107:20 says He sent his word, and healed them, and the Spirit is the one who takes a sentence out of a book and sets it down in a hallway on a county road.

What a word does when it is spoken

Here is the pit, and I am going to name it because you will not name it for yourself.

Somewhere in the last few years you wrote a job description, and you are not in it. You are the one who carries. You are the one who shows up. You are the one with the notebook. And a person who has been the one who carries for long enough loses the ability to picture himself as the one who is carried, and it does not feel like unbelief from the inside. It feels like humility. It feels like not making a fuss.

It is not humility. Humility is standing under what God said. What you have been doing is standing beside it, holding the door for everybody else to walk through.

You have the standing to say over your own body exactly what you have said over forty other people. That standing is not mine to hand out and not yours to work up to. Christ is in you, the authority is His and delegated, and Hebrews 4:12 calls the word of God quick and powerful, and it is His Spirit who makes it live when a tired man says it out loud in an empty building.

I want to hold two things in front of you at the same moment, because this site would be lying to you if it only held one. God heals. He heals bodies, and that is not a rumor and not a figure of speech, and Scripture says it too plainly for me to soften it. And I do not promise you the result. I cannot and I will not, and no honest voice can. We say what He has said and we leave the current to Him. If the result does not come, or does not come the way you asked, that is not a verdict on you. Nobody failed to have enough faith here. That sentence is not in the book and it is not true, and I will not let it through the door.

None of this stands against the people caring for your body. Keep your appointments. Take what you have been given to take. The God who hears you in a hallway is not in a competition with a doctor's office and never has been.

Fear of sounding foolish in an empty building has no right to stay. John 6:63 puts the weight on the words Jesus speaks rather than on the room or the steadiness of whoever is saying them, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying them, so foolishness has nothing here to work with.

And one more thing, because I mean it and I am not going to bury it at the bottom. If this has taken you somewhere darker than tired, if you have caught yourself thinking the people you carry would manage fine without you, tell one human being today and not tomorrow. In the United States, call or text 988. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one person who can sit with you tonight. A page cannot do that job. You deserve somebody in the room with you.