He Has Never Sat All the Way Down

His wife pointed it out and she was not being unkind about it. They were watching something, and she said: you never sit back.

He said something dismissive and then noticed, over the following week, that it was completely true and that he had never once known it. In a restaurant, on the front third of the chair. At his sister's house, forward, forearms on his knees. In his own living room, in a chair he chose and paid for, in a house with the door locked, sitting the way a man sits in a waiting room.

He is fifty-two. He has not been in danger for a very long time. And his body is arranged, at eight o'clock on a Thursday evening in his own home, in a posture that a body adopts when it may need to stand up quickly.

I want to be careful here, and I want to say why before I go on. There is an easy article to write at this point, and it explains the man by telling a story about his childhood and hands a verdict to a family who are not here to answer it. I am not going to do that. I do not know his people. Neither does anybody else reading this, and diagnosing a stranger's parents from a sitting position is not insight, it is a shortcut that costs a reader something real.

What I will say is a description and not a cause. Some people learned early to be ready, and their bodies kept the lesson long after the room changed. That is not a defect. It is a body that has been on duty for decades, and nobody has ever told it that the shift is over.

Underneath is a direction

Let me put a line down, and I want to notice which way it points.

The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.Deuteronomy 33:27

Underneath. Not around, not ahead, not beside. Underneath, which is the direction a floor comes from, and the direction a chair comes from, and the only direction that matters to a body deciding whether it is safe to put its weight down.

Moses is at the end of his life when he says this, blessing the tribes, and he has spent forty years in a moving camp. He is not describing a settled man's theology. He is describing what has actually been under a whole nation of people who slept in tents.

You are on everlasting arms, and they have been underneath through every chair you have ever perched on. That is not a comfort I am offering to a tired man. It is what is written in Deuteronomy 33, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a written line and puts it under a body at eight in the evening. The chair is upholstery. The arms are everlasting.

And notice the adjective. Everlasting, meaning they were there before the vigilance started and they will be there after it stops, and at no point in between did they require the man to notice them in order to be holding him.

You have been held the whole time by something that does not need your attention to keep working. Deuteronomy 33:27 is the written word for it, and His Spirit is the one who makes an old blessing land in a living room in a country Moses never heard of.

Nobody is on trial and nothing needs excavating

Now the part this category exists for, and it needs to be said plainly.

There is no assignment here to go and find out why. There is no requirement to understand his history in order to sit back in a chair. That may come, and if it does it belongs with somebody trained to sit with it, not with an article and not on a Thursday evening.

And there is nobody to prosecute. Whatever a man's early life was, the people in it were carrying their own weather, and turning them into the villains of an explanation does not usually help the man and it never helps the people. This article is not going to hand anybody a case to make.

What I want to offer instead is much smaller and much more available.

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.Matthew 11:28

Rest, in that sentence, is a gift given rather than a state achieved. There is no prerequisite about understanding yourself first. He does not say come once you know why you are tired.

You were invited without a prerequisite, and no explanation of your history has ever been required at the door. Matthew 11:28 is the line it rests on, and it is the Spirit who lets a man accept something without first earning the right to it by understanding it.

You are safe right now, in this room, whether or not your back has ever touched the back of a chair. It is written that the eternal God is a refuge and underneath are the everlasting arms, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that true in a body that has been on duty since it was small.

If any of this ever turns dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and tell a doctor or a counselor about the evenings and the chairs. A body that has been alert for forty years often needs a real person to help it stand down, and being held by God has never been a reason to try that alone.