The Second Sitting

The tomatoes came in Tuesday and they will not wait, so she is at it, and she is doing it the way she does everything now, which is in two goes with a chair in the middle.

August in that kitchen is a particular thing. The fan in the window turning nothing around, the pot going on the back burner because the front one runs hot, the jars out on a dish towel in two rows, the lids in the little pan. The smell of it gets into the curtains and stays till October. Her mother did this. Her mother's mother did it in the same kitchen with a different stove.

First sitting is the scalding and the peeling, and she gets through most of a bushel and then her hands tell her, in the way they do now, and she sits down in the chair by the door with the fan on her. Twenty minutes, sometimes thirty. She does not sleep. She looks at the row of jars and at the light going long across the linoleum and she waits for the rest of it to come back.

Second sitting is the packing and the water bath and the wiping of the rims. She will finish tonight. She always finishes. It just takes two.

Now here is the part she would never say to anybody. People ask her how she is, and they mean the big thing, the one with the name on it, and she gives them the answer they came for. Nobody has ever once asked about the two sittings. And the two sittings are her life. Not the big thing. The big thing is a sentence. The two sittings are the mornings and the afternoons and the evenings, every day, for years now, and there is no story in them, and nobody is coming to hear about them.

That is you, perhaps, in your own kitchen, or your own truck, or your own hallway that got longer. Whatever it is you do in two goes now. And somewhere along the line you began to carry a quiet idea that the second sitting is not really your life, that your life is somewhere off to the side waiting for this to be over, and that what you are doing in the meantime is just getting through.

What the psalm actually promises

I want to put a verse in front of you that has been misread at me my whole life, and read it the way it stands.

Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down: for the LORD upholdeth him with his hand.Psalm 37:24

Look at what it does not say. It does not say he never falls. The falling is right there in the first three words, admitted, not argued with, not treated as a scandal. David is not describing a person whose feet never slip. He is describing what is underneath a person whose feet do.

And look at the tense of it. Upholdeth. Not upheld, one time, in a crisis, at the dramatic moment. Not will uphold, later, when this is over and there is something to tell people. Present, ongoing, unremarkable, going on right now in a kitchen at four in the afternoon while nothing whatsoever is happening.

You are being held up in the chair by the door, in the twenty minutes, in the part with no story in it. Psalm 37:24 says the Lord upholdeth him with his hand, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old present tense verb be true in a hot August kitchen and not just true on a page.

That is the first thing I want in you tonight. The hand is not waiting at the end of your day for the interesting part. The hand is under the second sitting.

The two sittings are not a lesser emergency

Now the thing I have seen do the most quiet damage, and I am going to name it straight out.

When a hard thing goes on long enough, the people around it run out of ways to treat it as an emergency, so they file it as something else, and the thing they file it as is usually a faith problem. Nobody says that out loud. It arrives as a question with a soft voice on it: are you still believing for that. Have you had anybody pray. It arrives as a book somebody lends you. And after a while you start doing it to yourself, which is worse, because there is nobody to answer back to.

So let me say it flat. A thing that has gone on a long time is not evidence about you. Not about your faith, not about your words, not about some sin you never got to the bottom of. Nobody in this kitchen failed to have enough faith. That sentence is not in the book and it is not true, and I would take it off you with my hands if I could reach it.

And I am not going to hand you the other thing either, the one people reach for when the emergency file will not close. I am not going to tell you to accept it. Acceptance is not the goal here and it is not the target I am aiming you at. Neither is it a failure to have made a kind of peace with the pace of your days. Both of those get sold as spiritual achievements and neither one is. What I am after is dignity in the hours, and the hours are the two sittings.

God heals. I will say that plainly on this page as on every other, because it is written and it is His character and He has not stepped back from it.

And I do not promise you the result, and I will not, and I am saying that right here where the heat is, because this is precisely the paragraph where a promise would sell. What He does with your body is His. What is yours tonight is the jars and the chair and the hand under both.

You have a life that is running right now, and it is not on hold and it never was. Psalm 37:24 has the hand under the man while he is falling and not only after he is up, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that hand something you can feel under a bushel of tomatoes on an ordinary Tuesday.

And one more thing, said plain, because I mean it. If the long ordinary has taken you somewhere darker than tired, if some part of you has caught itself thinking the house would be easier without you in it, tell a living person today and not tomorrow. In the United States, call or text 988 and a person answers. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one human being who can sit in that kitchen with you tonight. A page cannot sit in a chair. A person can, and you deserve one.