The Stool She Pulled to the Stove

The stool came in from the garage on a Tuesday and never went back out.

It is wooden, it wobbles a little on the left leg, and one of her sons put a folded square of cardboard under it about a year ago and everybody has stopped noticing. It lives beside the stove now, at the corner where the counter turns, close enough that she can reach the pot and the board and the drawer with the wooden spoons without getting up. She sits to chop. She sits to stir. She sits to shell the beans into the blue bowl with the chip out of the rim, which is the bowl she has used for that job for thirty years, and the beans still come out the same.

Everything in that kitchen still works. The food is what it always was. She knows exactly how long the rice takes without looking, and the pot that sticks, and how much of the green stuff is too much for her son in law who says he likes it and does not.

Here is the thing that stopped, and it did not stop all at once.

The good plates are on the top shelf with a dish towel over them, and they have not come down in a long time. She used to make food for fourteen people and stand the whole time and hand things across the counter and never sit until everybody else had. Now the phone rings on a Thursday and it is her granddaughter, and the girl says, Abuela, can we come Sunday, and there is a small pause you could drive a truck through, and she says, ay, not this week, mija, the kitchen is a mess, another time.

The kitchen is not a mess. The kitchen is immaculate. She is looking at the stool while she says it.

Because the food is not the problem and the work is not the problem. The problem is that they would come in, and they would see her sit down, and something would go across their faces that she would have to watch, and then everybody in the room would be careful with her. She would rather cook for nobody than be handled at her own table.

That is you, perhaps, with your own version of the stool. Not a crisis. Nothing dramatic. Just an ordinary adjustment you made so your life could keep working, and then a door you closed on people so nobody would see the adjustment, and now the adjustment is fine and the closed door is the thing that is actually costing you.

The sitting is not the shameful part

Let me say the first thing carefully, because everything else stands on it.

There is nothing wrong with the stool. Nothing. It is a tool, like the wooden spoon and the cardboard under the leg, and it is doing exactly what a good tool does, which is let the work happen. A person who sits to do a job is doing the job. The rice does not know. The beans do not know. Nobody at a table has ever tasted the difference between food made standing and food made sitting, and if anybody has ever suggested to you that the sitting is a step down, they were telling you about their own fear and calling it your situation.

Now hear where God stands in relation to a woman on a stool.

The LORD upholdeth all that fall, and raiseth up all those that be bowed down.Psalm 145:14

Look at what He is doing in that sentence, because it is not what people usually quote it for. He upholdeth. Present tense, ongoing, a hand under something that is already leaning. Not He restores everyone to standing and then walks away, and not He waits at the far end of the process to congratulate the ones who got back up. The verb is a hand under you while it is happening, which means the ordinary Tuesday in the middle of a long thing is not the part God skips.

You are held up in the ordinary hours of this and not only at the emergencies. That is not a nice thought I had for you. Psalm 145:14 says it, the Holy Spirit is the One who takes that line and makes it something a person can feel at four in the afternoon in her own kitchen, and it lands on the hour you are actually in.

You have a life that is running right now, and it is not on hold until something changes. It is written that He upholdeth all that fall, and He is upholding a life, not a waiting room, and His Spirit is present in a Thursday with nothing special in it.

This is not a crisis, and it is not a lesser one either

Two things get said to people in your position and both of them are wrong, and I want to name them both because you have almost certainly been handed one of each.

The first says this is a small emergency. Something urgent that has simply not been resolved yet, so every conversation about it is a conversation about fixing it, and every time somebody sees you they check your face for news. That framing turns your entire life into a hallway. Nobody lives in a hallway. You have Thursdays, you have a blue bowl with a chip in it, you have people who love you, and none of that is a corridor leading somewhere real.

The second says this is a faith problem that went on too long. That one arrives dressed as encouragement, usually gently, usually from somebody who means well, and it lands like a bill. Nobody failed to have enough faith here. That sentence is not in the book and it is not true. Your ordinary hours are not a report card and the stool is not evidence about you and God.

And I am not going to swap those two for a third thing, which is to tell you that acceptance is the goal. It is not. I am not asking you to make peace with anything or to file this under settled, and I am not going to say the word acceptance over your life as though the aim of all this were to get you to stop minding. But hear the other half of that too, because this is where people get crushed: on the days you have made your peace with it, that is not a failure and it is not you giving up. You are allowed to be at rest about it on Tuesday and not at rest about it on Wednesday. Neither day is a verdict.

Here is what I hold, in one breath, both halves. God heals. He heals bodies, He is a healer, that is His word and His character 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, and nobody honest can. I do not know what He will do with what you carry, and anybody who tells you they know is selling something. We say what He has said and we leave the current to Him. Both halves are true at once, and neither one cancels the other.

You are carried straight through the ordinary middle of this, and the middle is not a hallway. Psalm 145:14 says His hand is under the ones who are bowed down while they are bowed, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes an unremarkable Wednesday a day God is plainly present in, so not one hour of this year has gone unattended.

And one more thing, said plainly. If the ordinariness of this has worn you down to somewhere darker than tired, if you have caught yourself thinking the people you love would have an easier time without you in the room, tell a human being today, not tomorrow. In the United States, call or text 988. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one person who can come and sit in your kitchen tonight. A page cannot be that person. You deserve one, and asking is not a burden you are putting on anybody.