Four Chairs In Row Six

He counts them without meaning to, the way your tongue finds a gap.

Row six, four along from the aisle. Two adults, two boys, and a folding chair on the end for the grandmother when she came, which made it five, and for about six years it was one of the fixed features of that room. You could set a watch by them. The younger boy could not sit still and did not have to; that family had been there long enough that nobody minded a small boy walking up the side aisle during the second hymn.

They have been gone since the summer before last.

Now the room fills up around row six the way water goes round a stone. People sit in front of it and behind it. Nobody has sat in those four for nineteen months, which he knows is not a policy and is not deliberate, and is one of those things that happens in a room where people have their own seats and nobody moves.

He preaches over the top of them every week.

And here is the thing he has never said. He is not thinking about the family for most of the service. He is doing his job, and he is good at it, and he is not a man who mopes. But there is a moment, most weeks, usually about four minutes in, when his eyes go there without permission. It is not a thought. It is nearer to the way you notice a missing tooth.

Nineteen months of that is quite a lot of noticing.

Last winter he did something he has told nobody about. He came in one Tuesday to change a bulb, and the room was empty, and he went and sat in one of those four chairs for a while, in the middle of a weekday, in his coat.

He could not have told you why he did it and he did not stay long. He said afterwards, to himself, in the car, that it was a stupid thing for a grown man to do.

It was not.

What the psalm puts on either side

Before the verse, let me say the plain thing, because plain is what I have got and it is what this deserves.

Nineteen months is not a long time for this. People will assume it is. There is a general expectation that a congregation moving in and out is weather, and that a man in your position gets used to it the way a farmer gets used to rain. You have never got used to it and you are not going to, and that is not a defect in you.

You loved a household. They are not there. It is a hole in a room you stand in front of every seven days.

Now here is where God puts the binding up of wounds, and it is the placement that matters more than the line.

He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds. He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names.Psalm 147:3-4

Read the two sentences together, because they were written together and almost nobody quotes them together.

Broken hearts, and then stars. The smallest, most private, most invisible injury a person can carry, and then the whole visible universe counted and named. The psalm sets them side by side without a joint, as though they were the same order of work.

That is not a coincidence and it is not poetry for its own sake. It is a deliberate statement about the kind of God this is. The one who counts stars is close enough to bind a wound, and the one binding the wound is the one holding the sky up, and neither task is a distraction from the other.

So hear this, sitting in a coat on a Tuesday in an empty room: you are being bound up right now, in the specific hurt, not in general. That is not my sentiment; it is what His word puts directly beside the numbering of the stars, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes two verses that live next door to each other and lays them across a man's chest.

Now let me take one thing off you, because you called it stupid in the car and it was not.

Sitting in that chair was the truest thing you did that month. It was a man going and standing in the place where the loss is, on purpose, without an audience, which is exactly what people do at gravesides and exactly why gravesides exist. You have no graveside for this. So you made one, out of a folding chair in an empty hall, and God was in that room with you and did not think it was stupid for one second.

Scripture never once treats grief expressed in a body as immaturity. The psalms are full of people doing physical things with sorrow, and the Holy Spirit is not embarrassed by a man in his coat on a Tuesday.

And I am not going to tell you that family comes back. I do not know, and anybody who says they know is guessing at you.

What I will tell you is that the four chairs are not a scoreboard. They have been reading like one for nineteen months, sitting there in your sightline every Sunday like a running total of what you failed to keep. They are not that. They are a place where people you loved used to sit, which is a sad thing and an ordinary thing and not a verdict on a shepherd.

You are healed in the broken part, in the present tense, whether or not that row ever fills. His word says he healeth and bindeth up as things God does by nature, and the Holy Spirit has been doing it in a man who looks at row six four minutes into every service without meaning to.