The Last Chair They Have Not Stacked

They started stacking at ten to five, which is early, and they have worked their way in from the window without once looking at her.

It goes two chairs to a table, upside down, legs in the air, and the sound is the same sound every time and it is coming closer. The kid with the mop has done the far corner and is working backward toward the counter. Somebody has turned off the machine that hisses. The tables around her are bare now and there is one chair in the whole room still on its feet, and she is sitting in it.

Her cup has been empty for an hour and a half. There is a dried ring on the table where it stood before she moved it. She has not looked at her phone in eleven minutes, which is a record for the week, and she is not going to look at it again because looking at it is how the whole thing starts.

Six days. Six days since it was sent off and somebody said they would call, and nobody said which day. Six days of waking at ten to five in the morning as reliably as these people stack chairs at ten to five in the afternoon.

And in those six days she has lived through the phone call about two hundred times. Both versions. She has the bad one down to the actual wording now: the tone the voice would take, where the pause would come, what she would say back, who she would tell first and in what order and whether she would sit down before or after. She has rehearsed it in the car, in the shower, in the twenty minutes before the alarm. She has rehearsed the good one too, but the good one never runs the whole way through, because the good one has nothing to prepare for.

She stays in the cafe because at home there is nothing at all between her and the rehearsing. Here there is a mop, and a kid stacking chairs, and the smell of the floor cleaner, and none of it belongs to her, which is exactly what makes it bearable.

That is you, perhaps, in the last chair anybody has not turned upside down yet. You are not sitting there because you like it. You are sitting there because you have nowhere you want to be next, and because moving means being alone with the rehearsal again, and you have run it enough times this week to know exactly how much it costs.

What the rehearsing is actually for

Let me tell you what the rehearsing is trying to do, because it is not madness and it is not weakness and you did not choose to start it.

It is trying to protect you. Somewhere underneath, the reasoning goes like this: if I live through the worst version enough times in advance, it will not be able to arrive and knock me down, because I will already have been standing there when it came. Pre-living as armor. It is an intelligent instinct and it is doing its best.

It also does not work, and I think you know that, and I think you know it in the specific way a person knows something at ten to five in the morning. Nothing that actually happens arrives in the shape you rehearsed. What the rehearsal reliably does is make you live the bad news on days when there is no bad news, which means you pay for it in advance whether or not there is ever a bill.

And here is the mechanical part, the thing nobody names. When you rehearse, you pour your heart out into your own lap. It goes round. It comes back. It has nowhere else to be. The psalm is not asking you to stop having a heart full of this. It is telling you where to put it.

Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us. Selah.Psalm 62:8

Pour out. Not tidy up, not present appropriately, not compress into something short and reverent. Pour, which is what you do with a full container when you want it empty, and which does not care what shape the contents are in.

You have somewhere to put the whole of this, including the version of it you would not say to your sister. That is not my idea. It stands written in Psalm 62:8, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes those two words, pour out, and turns them from a nice sentence into a thing you can actually do at a sink at half past five.

You are inside a refuge right now, in the last chair in a cafe, with your cup dry and the mop going round behind you. The word says God is a refuge for us, present tense, and His Spirit is not waiting at the far end of these six days to start being with you. He is in the sixth day.

Pour out your heart, and where it goes

Now the pit, and it is a mean one, and it opens under people who are trying to do this well.

It goes: I should not be this frightened. Other people wait better than this. If I trusted properly I would have peace, and I do not have peace, so the trust must be defective. And so a person adds a second weight to the first, and starts policing their own heart at ten to five in the morning while it is already doing all it can.

Read the verse again, because it puts those two in the same breath and it puts them in an order. Trust in him at all times, and then immediately, pour out your heart. If trusting meant not having a heart full of this, the second half would be unnecessary. It is not a contradiction. The pouring out is what trusting looks like from the inside, in a week like this one.

That sentence, the one that says you did not have enough faith and that is why the peace is not showing up, is not in the book and it is not true. Nobody in this cafe failed at anything. You are six days into a hard stretch and running an intelligent instinct on a loop, and what you need is not a rebuke, it is a direction to pour in.

You are trusting Him already in the act of telling Him the worst sentence out loud. Psalm 62:8 puts pouring out and trusting in the same verse for exactly this reason, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an emptied heart feel like faith rather than failure.

And I will not do the other thing either, the thing that is done to waiting people all the time. I am not going to tell you which way this goes. I do not know. Nobody writing to you knows, and anybody who tells you they have a sense about it has handed you one more thing to manage. What I have to give you is a place to put the six days, and that place holds equally well whichever call comes.