The Chair by the Window and the List

The chair faces the window because that is where his son put it, and he has never asked to have it turned.

From it he can see the end of the driveway, the mailbox, the corner of the shop with the doors he cannot get to anymore, and about a hundred yards of road. In the afternoon the light comes across the sill and lies on the arm of the chair and warms it, and he sits in that light for a couple of hours, and the day goes by out there at a distance of forty feet.

For thirty years he was the one you called. That is not him bragging, it is just the fact of it. Truck, trailer, chain, come along. He hauled every young couple in that valley into their first house. He was at the church at six in the morning on funeral days setting up chairs. When a man's transmission went out on the grade he was the one who came, and he did not take anything for it, and if you offered he would look at you a certain way and you would not offer again.

Then the ladder went out from under him on somebody else's roof, and the surgeon said what surgeons say, and it has been four years, and he gets from the chair to the bathroom with a walker and it takes him a while and he does not like being watched doing it.

Here is what he cannot say out loud to his son or to the preacher or to anybody who comes by with a casserole. Not that he hurts, though he does. What he cannot say is that he thinks whatever he was for went out the door on that stretcher. That he was a pair of hands and a truck, and there is no truck and the hands do not do it, and he suspects that God has him on a shelf now, well thought of and not needed.

On the sill in front of him there is a spiral notebook, the kind that costs almost nothing, and a pencil with no eraser left.

He writes names in it. Not on purpose, exactly. Somebody comes to mind while he is sitting there, a boy he taught to drive a stick, a woman whose husband left in March, the nurse with the two jobs, and he writes the name down and he says something to God about them, and that is all. There are eleven pages of names. He has never once called it anything, and if you asked him what it was he would say it is a notebook, and change the subject.

You have your own chair and your own view of forty yards of road. Maybe it is a bed, maybe it is a bad year of your body, maybe it is a diagnosis that took the part of you that everybody called. And you have decided, quietly, without ever putting it in words, that whatever you were for went out the door with it. You are still the person God had in mind, and the ladder did not get a vote on that. It is written in Psalm 92:14 that they still bear fruit in old age and are ever full of sap and green, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been sitting in that afternoon light beside a spiral notebook for four years, putting names into a man's head that he did not go looking for.

Bearing is not the same word as hauling

Here is the verse, and the whole thing turns on one verb.

They still bear fruit in old age; they are ever full of sap and green.Psalm 92:14

Bear. Not produce. Not achieve. Not get after it. Bear is what a tree does, and a tree does not work. A tree stands where it is planted, and it takes what comes up the trunk, and in its season fruit appears on it, and nobody in the history of orchards has ever said that a tree earned its apples.

And look at the picture the psalm is drawing. Two verses up it is talking about a tree planted in the house of the LORD, and planted is a passive word: somebody else did the planting and chose the spot. The tree did not select the ground and the tree cannot move to better ground. Its whole part in the business is to be alive where it was put.

That is not a demotion. That is the actual mechanism, and it was always the mechanism, including in the thirty years of the truck and the chain. You thought the fruit was coming off your strength. It was coming off your life.

You have sap in you and it is coming up from a root that a ladder cannot reach. Psalm 92:14 is where that is written, in a verb about bearing rather than about doing, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the sap, moving in a man in a chair in the afternoon light exactly as much as He moved in a man with a come along in his hand.

Nobody here is grading your output

Now the honest part, and it is the part this whole page stands on.

Your capacity is genuinely reduced. I am not going to talk around that or suggest that a better attitude would get you down the porch steps. It would not, and anybody who has implied otherwise to you was speaking from a body that still does what they ask it to.

And restored is not replaced. God is not handing you a smaller version of the man with the truck, some scaled down model that hauls less. That man is not being reissued. What is being restored is you, the person, and the person is not a set of capabilities with a name attached to it.

So hear this next sentence carefully, because it is the one the enemy of your soul has been keeping out of this room for four years. Usefulness is not the proof of restoration. It is not the test, it is not the evidence, and it is not the receipt. If that notebook stayed shut from now on and not one more name went in it, you would be exactly as restored as you are with eleven pages full. The fruit is not what makes the tree a tree.

You are not on a shelf, and you are not being kept around out of politeness by a God who ran out of jobs for you. The word says the ones planted in His house are still full of sap and green, said about people well past their working years, and it is the same Spirit who is that green in you today, whatever your body is doing or refusing to do.

And if you are angry about the ladder, be angry. That is not a spiritual failure and it does not have to be resolved before God will do anything here. There is nothing on this page you have to be cheerful enough to qualify for.