The Mirror Behind the Chair

The chair is the second one along, the one with the split in the leather arm that somebody taped years ago, and the tape has gone the same color as the leather now, so you have to run a thumb across it to find the edge.

Saturday morning. The bell over the door still works. The radio is up over the clippers, there is talc and clipper oil and somebody's cologne in the air, an older man in the waiting row with a folded newspaper he is not reading, a boy on the end of the bench swinging his sneakers a foot above the floor. The cape goes over him, gets tucked at the collar, and the man with the clippers asks the thing he asks every time, already reaching for the guard, not looking up.

How is it going, hermano.

Fine, he says. Good. You know.

Which is true the way a coat is a house. It keeps the weather off.

Because here is what he is actually looking at while the clippers start. There is a mirror in front of him and a mirror behind him, and in the front one he can see the back of his own head, and behind that another one, and another, going back into a green tunnel until they get too small to be a person. He sat in this chair the week he first prayed about this. He knows the week exactly, because he prayed in the parking lot before he came in, both hands on the wheel, and he walked through that door expecting something.

That was four springs ago. Four springs of the same chair, the same cape, the same question and the same one word answer. Fine. And the years are stacked in the mirror behind him, one head after another after another, and every one of them is a man who asked and did not get an answer, and every one of them is him.

That is you, perhaps, in your own chair. You have an honest answer and you have a short one, and you have used the short one so often that it comes out before you have decided to say it. And somewhere between the first time you asked and this morning, the not answering quietly stopped feeling like silence and started feeling like a reply.

Fine is a short word for a long thing

I want to start where you actually are, and where you actually are is not at the beginning of this.

You know how to talk about it now. There is a version for the barber, a version for work, a version for the person at church who asks with their head tilted, and a shorter version for anybody who might follow up. You are not lying. You are managing. There is no way to hand somebody four springs across a counter, so you hand them one word and you take the change and you go.

But there is a cost to being fluent in the short version, and this is it. After a while, you start handing the short version to God as well. The prayer goes from a paragraph to a sentence to a shape you make in the car without words. Not because you stopped caring. Because you got tired of hearing your own voice ask the same thing, and because somewhere in the third spring you began to suspect that the asking itself had become the embarrassing part.

Now hear what is actually written about where God stands in relation to a man in that chair.

The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.Psalm 34:18

Read the grammar before you read the comfort. Nigh. Present tense. Not coming, not on the way, not nigh once the thing resolves. And read who He is nigh unto, because four springs will have talked you out of this part. He is not near to the ones who got their answer. He is near to them that are of a broken heart. A broken heart is not the disqualification in that sentence. It is the address.

You are one of them that are of a broken heart, and Psalm 34:18 says the LORD is nigh unto you. That is not my opinion about your situation and I could not have invented it. It was written long before your first spring, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line a shepherd wrote while he was hiding and lets it be heard over the clippers in a barbershop.

You have not been moved to the back of any line because your answer has not come. There is no such line. Scripture nowhere sorts people by how long they have been asking, and His Spirit is not somewhere else this morning, waiting on news about you before He comes back.

Nobody in here is going to explain the four springs

Now let me tell you what I am not going to do, and I want you to feel me refuse it, because you have probably been handed all three.

I am not going to explain the delay. I do not know why the answer has not come, and neither does anybody who has told you they do. I am not going to assign the four springs a purpose, hand you the lesson they were supposedly teaching, or tell you what God was building in you while you sat there, because I was not shown that and I will not invent something to fill a quiet. And I am not going to suggest there is a missing key, a phrase you have not said, a sin you have not remembered, a posture you have not tried yet. Nobody failed to have enough faith here. That sentence is not in the book and it is not true, and the people who repeat it are usually frightened of the silence themselves.

Here is the pit, plainly, because it is the real one. Four springs of nothing happening did not stay a fact about your circumstances. It quietly became a fact about you. Silence got promoted to verdict, and the verdict reads: something about me is the reason. That sentence works on a person in the dark better than almost anything else, and it has been running so long in the background that you no longer hear it as a sentence. You hear it as the weather.

So let me put both true things side by side in one breath, because this is exactly the place where a page like this would be tempted to give you only one of them. God heals. He is a healer, He heals bodies, that is His character and His word and not a rumor, and this site was built to say it out loud. And I do not promise you the result. I cannot and I will not. I do not know what He is going to do with the thing you have carried through four springs, and no honest voice does. We declare what He has said and we leave the current to Him. Both halves stand, and neither one is a hedge against the other.

You are held inside an unanswered thing, and that is a real place to be rather than a waiting room outside the real place. Psalm 34:18 puts God nigh to the broken hearted rather than to the resolved, and the same Spirit who carries that word is with you in the chair this morning, mid sentence, with nothing settled.

And one more thing, because I mean it and I am not going to say it quickly. If four springs of this have taken you somewhere darker than tired, if you have caught yourself thinking the room would be lighter without you in it, 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 a person in the room, and reaching for one is not weakness, it is the same courage that kept you asking.