The Seat Nobody Fights You For

There is one chair in that hall that never gets taken quickly, and the whole room knows which one it is without anybody ever having said so.

Watch the choreography some week when you are not in it, because it is a small marvel of human engineering. The moment the last song ends, three people discover an urgent need to top up the water jug. Somebody remembers a thing they must say to somebody at the opposite end of the building and sets off at a good pace. A perfectly pleasant man takes the long way round to the kettle, a route that adds about eleven meters and passes nothing of interest. Nobody is unkind. Nobody says a word. The room simply reorganizes itself, gently and completely, in about four seconds, the way water goes round a stone.

And you sit down.

You do it the same way every week. You get your tea first, because you have learned that you will not get another chance at it. You take the chair at the angle where you can still see the door, which is not about escape, it is about knowing how long you have. And then the hour begins, and it is a real hour, and you know exactly how long an hour is.

I am not going to describe him.

You know precisely why the room moves the way it does, and I am not going to write it down, because there is a version of this piece that gets its laugh out of that description and it would cost a man something he cannot defend in his absence. He is not the joke here. He is not the difficulty here. He is a person who is at that building every single week, earlier than most, who keeps a spare pen and will give it to you and never ask for it back, and who is loved by God with the same ferocity as everybody carrying the water jug.

What I will say is that it costs you something. It genuinely does. You come out of that hour flat in a way that is hard to explain to anybody at home, and you cannot even complain about it properly, because the complaint would require the description, and you will not give the description either.

So nobody knows. Not the leaders, who are glad the seat is covered and have never thought about it beyond that. Not your family, who have noticed only that you are quiet on the drive back. Nobody has ever said thank you, and if they did you would hate it, and you have gone home wanting it anyway, and both of those things being true at once is the part that makes you feel like a fraud.

That is where this stops being a scene and starts being about you.

First, the freedom to stop

Let me get this out of the way before anything else, because if it comes later it will sound like a consolation prize.

Nothing in this article is a nudge to do more. If you stopped next week, if you took the tea and sat somewhere else and let the hour belong to somebody else, God would not think less of you by a single degree. That needs saying plainly, because articles like this one have been used for a long time to squeeze tired people into another year of something, and I am not doing that to you.

You are loved by God ahead of anything you are useful for, and the order has never been the other way round. Scripture says He did not set His love upon His people because they were more in number than any people, but because He loved them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lands that on a woman who has quietly begun to suspect that her value in that building is a seat she keeps warm.

That is the ground. Everything else has to stand on it, because faithfulness that grows out of fear of being worthless is not faithfulness, it is a debt payment, and it will hollow a person out over about four years.

Now, with that settled, the actual thing.

God is not unrighteous to forget

There is a sentence in Hebrews that I think was written for exactly this hour, and it is stranger than the way we usually quote it.

For God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labour of love, which ye have shewed toward his name, in that ye have ministered to the saints, and do minister.Hebrews 6:10

Not unrighteous to forget. That is a peculiar way round to say it, and it is deliberate. It means forgetting would be an injustice. It means that if that hour went unrecorded, something would be wrong with the accounts of heaven, and there is nothing wrong with the accounts of heaven.

And look where the labor is aimed: shewed toward his name. Not toward the man in the chair. Not toward the leaders who have not noticed. Toward His name, which means the hour was never handed to a building in the hope that the building would say something back. It went somewhere else entirely, and it arrived.

You have a work that has already been received, and the receiving did not wait for anybody in that hall to mention it. Hebrews 6:10 puts it in the hands of a God for whom forgetting it would be unrighteousness, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a present fact in a person who has been driving home in silence for a long time.

There is another verse I want beside it, and I want it for him as much as for you. The Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart.

We usually read that as comfort for the overlooked, and it is. But turn it round in that hall for a moment. Whatever the room is reading off the outside of that man, God is not reading it. He is looking at something no one at the water jug has access to, and He has been looking at it every week, with an interest nobody else in the building has managed.

You were placed beside somebody God is actively looking at, and the sitting is not charity work. Scripture says the Lord looks on the heart, and the Spirit is the one who makes that change the temperature of a Sunday hour, because it turns out you have not been managing a problem, you have been sitting next to a man heaven finds interesting.

The difference between a complaint and an offering

Here is what I notice about that drive home. The hour has to go somewhere, and there are only two places it can go.

It can go into the account marked what I put up with. That account grows. It takes interest. Everything in it slowly turns into a case, and the case is against people who have no idea it is being built, and it will make you tired in a way that sleep does not fix.

Or it can be handed over. Named out loud, given to God, and let go of on the way past the roundabout.

Those two things look identical from the outside. Same hour, same chair, same silence in the car. The whole difference is who it gets said to, and whether it is kept or given.

You have a genuine offering in your hands on a Sunday, and it does not need a witness to be an offering. Scripture calls this presenting your body a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a plain unglamorous hour from a plastic chair to an altar without anything visible happening at all.

And notice what an offering does that a complaint cannot. It leaves your hands. A complaint stays with you all week and gets heavier. An offering is gone, and you go home lighter, and next Sunday starts from nothing rather than from a total.