The Chair That Stayed Empty

The cafe does them a long table by pushing two together and putting a cloth over the join, and it has been the same arrangement since before the current owner bought the place.

Thursdays, half seven. Eight of them, more or less, depending on shifts and grandchildren. A pot of tea the size of a small watering can that has to be refilled twice. A man who always orders the same thing and always reads the menu first. An argument about parking that has been going for six years and that everybody would miss.

There have been seven of them for fourteen months.

Nobody has moved the eighth chair. Not as a statement, and not as a gesture, and if you asked any of those men about it they would look at you blankly, because it is simply where the chair goes. The owner puts it out with the others. It gets sat in occasionally by somebody's son-in-law.

He is four miles away on Thursday mornings, doing the accounts he could do any day of the week.

He stopped after a bad autumn, and the reason he stopped is his own, and I am not going to ask you for yours either. What matters this morning is what has happened since, which is that fourteen months of not going to one thing has quietly become not going to several, and the space he lives in is now about four rooms wide.

Sit down here with me. Today I am speaking to the one who did something, a long way back, took it to God properly and meant every word, and has been getting steadily smaller ever since.

And before you brace for it: nobody here is setting you a pace. Stopping going is not a sin, this site is never going to call it one, and there is no timetable for a return anywhere in this message.

God's word for rescue is a word about width

In my grandmother's house the worst thing that could be said about a room was that it was mean. Not ugly, not old. Mean. Not enough room in it for people to be comfortable, and she considered that a kind of failure that no amount of decorating would fix.

There is a psalm where David describes what God did for him, and he does not reach for a word about relief or about safety.

He brought me forth also into a large place; he delivered me, because he delighted in me.Psalm 18:19

A large place. That is the word he chooses, and it is a spatial word, and the whole of the psalm before it is about being hemmed in, cords tight, snares round him, the narrow place closing.

God's answer to that is not a smaller and better defended room. It is width.

And then he tells you why it happened, and the reason is one of the most surprising clauses in the Psalms. Because he delighted in me. Not because David had earned an upgrade. Not because he handled the narrow place well. Because God liked him.

You are brought out into a large place, and you were brought there because God delights in you rather than because you performed well in the small one. I am not offering you an encouraging spin. The written word uses a spatial word for rescue and gives delight as the cause, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a man doing his accounts on a Thursday morning.

Narrow is not safe, it is only narrow

Here is the thing that fourteen months does, and it does it so gradually that no decision is ever made.

The first Thursday you did not go, it was one Thursday. Then it was a season. And somewhere in there, without any moment you could point at, the not going stopped being about that table and became a general policy, and the policy has been quietly acquiring territory ever since.

That is not weakness and it is not sin. It is what a narrow place does. It narrows.

And I want to say plainly that the narrowness has not been protecting you. It has felt like protection, and feeling like protection is most of its power, but a man in four rooms is not safer than a man in a town. He is only in four rooms.

You are made for a large place, and you were never designed to be kept safe by being kept small. Scripture calls the rescue width rather than shelter, and it is His Spirit, not a decision made on a Thursday at twenty past seven, who brings a man out into more room than he has been living in.