The Sound Of The Chairs Going Back

It is the sound that gets him.

Twenty past twelve, the hall empty, and the chairs going back onto the stack eight at a time. Steel on steel, a dull knock, then the scrape of the stack getting shoved into the corner by the fire door. He has heard that sound roughly four hundred times a year for eleven years and he could pick it out of any noise on earth.

He is on his own doing it, which is nobody's fault. People had lunches on and grandchildren coming and a shift at two, and he told them all to go, and he meant it, and he would tell them again next week. That is not the problem and I am not going to pretend it is.

The problem is that when he shoves the last stack into the corner he stands there for a moment with his hand still on it, and what he feels is nothing at all.

Not sad. Not angry. Nothing. The tank read empty somewhere around February and it has read empty ever since, and he has kept driving on it because that is what you do.

He has an old folder. He has started going back into it, quietly, taking things he wrote four years ago and giving them again with a couple of words changed, and telling himself that is good stewardship. It is not good stewardship and he knows it. It is a man rationing what is left.

And here is the part I actually want to put my finger on.

Nobody has asked.

Not one person, since February, has said how are you, actually and then stood still long enough for the true answer. And it is not because they are cold or ungrateful. Most of them love him. It is that he is the one they ask for things, and it does not occur to anybody to ask a tap whether it is thirsty.

That is the whole of it, and it is not wickedness on anyone's part. It is a category error, and he made it too, years before they did.

So I am going to say the thing nobody in that building has said to him since February, and if you are the one stacking the chairs, I am saying it to you.

How are you, actually. I have got all day.

The invitation was shouted at the people doing the pouring

There is a day in John where Jesus stands up in the middle of a crowd on the last and greatest day of a feast, and He does not teach. He shouts.

If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, "Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water."John 7:37-38

Now look at the order of those two sentences, because the order is the entire message and almost everybody reads them the wrong way round.

The rivers are in the second sentence. The drinking is in the first.

You have spent years being handed that verse as a description of your job. Rivers, out of you, for other people, and the more the better, and you have organized your whole life around producing them. And the thirst in the first sentence, the coming and the drinking, you have quietly reassigned to the congregation, because you are the one who brings the water and they are the ones who need it. The Holy Spirit is the One who makes that true in a person rather than merely accurate on a page.

Read it again. If anyone thirsts. Anyone. That word was not written with an exemption in it for the person carrying the chairs.

He was not saying be a river. He was saying come and drink, and the flowing takes care of itself downstream of that, which is not your department and never was.

You are inside that invitation, because it was shouted at anyone who was thirsty and there is no exemption in it for the one carrying the chairs. It is written, if anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink (John 7:37), and the very next verse says the rivers are what the Spirit does downstream, because the text itself explains that He was speaking about the Spirit whom those who believed were to receive. It is the Holy Spirit and not your effort who does the flowing.

And I want to be very plain about what this message is not going to tell you to do, because you have heard the other thing until it is meaningless.

It is not going to tell you to pray more. It is not going to tell you to be more disciplined, get up earlier, get away for a few days, protect your time better, or rediscover your first love. That is all effort, and effort is exactly the thing that ran out in February. Handing more of it to a man in your condition is not care. It is one more item, given by somebody who is not carrying yours.

You do not have to fix the emptiness. You are not being asked to make water.

You are not required to produce anything tonight, and the supply was never coming out of your reserves. It is written that He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength (Isaiah 40:29), and the Holy Spirit is the One who does the giving in an empty hall at the end of a Sunday.

And I am going to say this straight, because it belongs in the open and this is the one place it might get said. If it has gone further than empty, if there have been thoughts about not being here, about the whole thing running more smoothly without you in it, do not sit alone with that tonight. In the United States, call or text 988. Anywhere else, ring your local crisis line, and tell one living human being tonight. Not a colleague, not a board member, a person. Reading this is good and it is not enough, and you are worth somebody sitting in the room.