I Cannot Sit Down

The chair has been on that porch four summers and it is still clean, because nobody sits in it.

It is dusk. The blue is going out of the sky over the roofs opposite and the streetlight at the corner has come on with that half second of hesitation it always has. He is out on the porch, standing, with both hands on the top of the rail like a man at the front of a boat.

He carried that chair out himself the first spring. Chose it. Wanted it. He sat down in it once, that first evening, for about ninety seconds, and he can tell you exactly what happened at second ninety-one, which is that his whole body came up out of it as though somebody had called his name from the yard.

He will tell you he is not the sitting kind, and he says it lightly, with no complaint in it and no judgment on anybody who is. It is just that his hands go looking. There are the cans to move round to the side. The hose is coiled wrong and it will kink like that. There is a thing in the gutter over the kitchen window that he has been meaning to get at, and while he is up.

Here is what it actually is, and he could not say this out loud to anybody, and it has nothing to do with the gutter.

Sitting down is giving up ground.

That is what his body decided a long time ago and it has never been talked out of it. All day he has been holding a position against a day that pushes, and while he is on his feet he is still holding it. The moment he sits, the day closes behind him. Everything he did not reach gets filed under not done and stays there. And worse than that, much worse: he would be at rest with things unfinished, and there has not been one hour of his life in which that felt safe.

So he holds the rail. The light goes. Somebody inside switches on a lamp and it lands in a yellow rectangle across the boards, right next to the empty chair.

And he is tired in a way that sleep does not reach, because he has not sat down at the end of a day in years. Not once. He goes to bed, and going to bed is a completely different activity. He has not stopped.

Somewhere behind him in the house a plate goes into a rack. A car goes past slow. The chair sits there with four summers of nobody in it, and the man who chose it stands two feet away holding a rail.

Perhaps that is you tonight, and it is not a porch, it is a kitchen you keep circling at nine o'clock, or a hallway, or the edge of a bed where you sit to take your shoes off and then stand straight back up. You have not sat down at the end of a day in longer than you would want to say out loud.

The psalmist had to tell his own soul

There is one line in the psalms for exactly this and it is not a suggestion, it is an instruction a man had to give himself.

Return unto thy rest, O my soul; for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee.Psalm 116:7

Look at who is talking to whom. He is not addressing God there. He has turned around inside himself and he is speaking to his own soul, out loud, in the imperative, the way you would speak to a dog that will not come in from the yard.

Which tells you something worth the whole page: a soul does not return to its rest by itself. It has to be told. If you have been standing at a rail for four summers, that is not a defect in your character, it is a soul that has not been spoken to, and the psalmist had the same one.

You are permitted to sit down on unfinished ground. That is not my kindness and it is not a soft reading, it is the plain sense of Psalm 116:7, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes an instruction a man once gave his own soul in the middle of trouble and puts it in the mouth of somebody standing on a porch at dusk with the gutter still full.

Now look at the reason he gives. This is the part that undoes the whole knot.

He does not say return to your rest because the work is finished. He does not say because you have earned it, or because you have done enough today, or because everything is safe now. He says: for the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee. The ground of the rest is what God has already done. Not what the day yielded. Not what got crossed off.

You have a reason to sit that has nothing to do with your list. The written reason is His dealing, past tense, already accomplished, standing there whether or not the hose is coiled right, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes a person able to lean their weight on something they did not build.

Nobody in that psalm had a finished day

I want you to see where the man in Psalm 116 was standing when he said it, because it matters enormously.

He was not on the far side of his troubles writing a summary. Read the psalm from the top and he is in it. The sorrows of death compassed him. He found trouble and sorrow. He says plainly that he was brought low. This is not a man whose situation resolved and who then sat down. This is a man in the middle of it, turning to his own soul and ordering it home.

So the rest was never waiting on the outcome. It was never going to arrive as a reward at the end of a day that finally came in clean, because no day has ever come in clean, and yours will not either, and that is not a failure of yours.

You are not behind. I know the list says otherwise, and I am not going to argue with the list, I am going to stand somewhere else entirely. Scripture puts a man's rest on the bountiful dealing of God rather than on his output, and the Holy Spirit is the One who can persuade a body of that at the exact hour the body is most convinced the opposite is true.

And let me be plain about what this evening is and is not. This is not a practice. It is not a discipline, a rhythm, a habit to keep, or something you are starting tonight and will have to maintain. There is no streak to break. Nobody is grading how it goes, least of all Him, and if you sit down for four minutes and get up again to move the cans, that is not a failed attempt, because it was never an attempt at anything.

You are being given one evening. Not a new regime. The word says the Lord has dealt bountifully, and a bountiful dealing is a gift and not a curriculum, and His Spirit is the One handing it over tonight, on a porch, in a kitchen, on the edge of a bed, wherever you have been standing.