I Do Not Know How to Sit Down

They came early on purpose, which is the part she has not forgiven them for yet.

She had been at work until six. She had the whole evening planned on the drive home, the way she always does: soup on by half past, bread in the oven at seven, the good bowls down from the top shelf, ice in the door of the freezer because somebody always wants it and she is the person who remembers. She was going to be tired and it was going to be worth it. That is the arrangement she has had with herself since she was nineteen.

She opened her own front door and smelled her own kitchen already cooking.

Four of them, in her house, with her apron on somebody else's waist. The soup was on. The bread was on the board and torn, not sliced, which is not how she does it and was better. Six places laid, mismatched chairs pulled around from the hall, and one chair at the end pulled back and waiting, and her name was not said out loud but everybody in the room knew whose chair it was.

She laughed. Of course she laughed. And then she went straight to the drawer for the serving spoon because her hands had to be doing something, and one of them took it out of her fingers, gently, the way you take scissors off a child, and said, no. Sit.

So she sat.

And here is what nobody at that table could see, because it was happening about four inches under her sternum. She could not work out what to do with her hands. She put them in her lap and that felt like a performance. She put them on the table and felt like a guest at somebody's business meeting. She reached for the water jug to pour for the person beside her and got her wrist patted. She caught herself scanning the counter for something out of place, some job left undone that would let her stand up honorably, and there was not one. They had thought of everything. That was the whole trouble.

The soup was set down in front of her by somebody else's hands. Steam came off it. It was good soup, better than hers, and she could feel her eyes stinging over a bowl of soup at her own table in front of four people who love her, and she could not have told you why if you had asked her straight out.

Somewhere near the bottom of it there was a sentence she had never once said out loud, and it went something like this: I know exactly what I am worth in a room when I am carrying something. I have no idea what I am worth in a room when I am sitting down.

The Table Was Never a Metaphor

Before anything else, let me say what I am not going to do with this.

There is a very old psalm about this exact evening, and the fastest way to spoil it is to turn it into a symbol in the first thirty seconds. People do it constantly. They get to the table and immediately explain that the table means fellowship, or that the green pastures mean spiritual refreshment, and the reader nods and goes to bed hungry, because a symbol has never once fed anybody.

So we are going to leave it as furniture for a while.

The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.Psalm 23:1

Read that second sentence again, slowly, because there is a verb in it doing something people skip over. He maketh me to lie down. Not He suggests it. Not He commends the practice of lying down and leaves it with me to arrange. He makes the sheep lie down, which is a thing a shepherd has to do on purpose, because a sheep in a good field with food in front of it will keep standing up and moving and checking, and the reason it will keep standing is not stubbornness. It is watchfulness. A sheep that is still braced for something does not lie down, and it does not eat properly either.

You are a sheep in a field with a shepherd standing in it, and the lying down is His job rather than a skill you have failed to learn. That is not a soft thing to say. Psalm 23:1 opens with a claim about who He is and follows it immediately with a claim about what He does to the body of the one He keeps, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a written line about a field and stands it up inside a kitchen where somebody has just been told to sit.

And notice what David does not say. He does not say, I shall not want because I have trained myself out of wanting. He says he does not lack, and the reason given is the Shepherd, not his own appetite management. The whole psalm is a list of things somebody else does: leads, restores, prepares, anoints, follows. There are almost no verbs left for the sheep. That is not an insult. That is the good news of the field.

You have been kept by Someone whose entire method is doing things for you while you are standing there not knowing what to do with your hands. I am not being poetic at you. The written word gives the Shepherd nearly every verb in that psalm on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that arithmetic land in the chest of a woman who has run every kitchen she has ever been in.

What Happens When the Serving Stops

Here is the part that goes unnamed, and naming it is most of the relief.

If you have been the one who carries things for long enough, your value and your usefulness get welded together somewhere in your early twenties, and after that you cannot feel the difference between them. Not because you are proud, and not because anybody told you to. It happened because it worked. Carrying was how you were loved back, and it was reliable, and reliable things become load bearing.

So the moment the carrying stops, the whole structure creaks. Sitting down does not feel restful. It feels like being unemployed. The hands go looking for a spoon because the hands have been doing the arguing for your right to be at the table since you were nineteen, and they do not know the case has already been closed.

You are welcome at that table as a guest, and you were never on the staff. Psalm 23:5 says He prepares a table before me, which puts the preparing on His side of the sentence and leaves nothing on yours but the sitting, and the Holy Spirit is the One who unhooks a person's worth from a serving spoon.

And this is where the psalm quietly refuses to become a metaphor, which is the best thing about it. There is a real table. There is oil, and a cup, and a head, and enemies who are not gone but are watching this happen. It is a physical scene, deliberately. It is not saying that God will give you a nice feeling about being valuable. It is saying He sets food in front of you while the trouble is still in the room, and He does not need the trouble to leave first.

You have a place laid at that table tonight, and your usefulness had nothing to do with the seating. That is what is written, and it is written about the sheep who does the least in the whole psalm, and the Holy Spirit is the One carrying it the distance between a page and a woman with her hands in her lap.