Stacking the Last Chairs

The stack goes eight high and no higher, because the ninth one slides off the top and brings the whole column down, and she learned that the hard way a long time ago.

So she counts them in eights. Eight on the rack by the kitchen hatch. Eight against the wall under the cork board with the nursery sign-up sheet still pinned to it. It is ten at night in the fellowship hall and everybody went home an hour and a half ago, after the last foil pan went out to somebody's back seat and the children were carried out asleep over shoulders. The coffee urn is unplugged and ticking as it cools. Two of the three banks of lights are off, because she knows which switch is which, and she should: she stood in this room when it was studs and dust, and she picked the color of the paint.

They call her Mother, and nobody remembers deciding to. Thirty years of women coming to her in this hall with their coats on and their faces coming apart. Thirty years of standing behind somebody at the front with a hand between their shoulder blades, praying them through, all the way through, until whatever was sitting on them got up off them and went. She has done it for a boy who was using and for a man of eighty who had never cried in front of anybody. She is the one they send for at eleven at night, and she goes.

And here is what nobody in this church knows, at ten at night with a stack of chairs in her arms. She has never once said out loud the question she has carried since she was thirty one, and it goes like this: what happened to me? Not to them. To me. There was no night for her. There was a Sunday, and a decision, and a supper afterward, and a Monday that felt like every other Monday, and thirty years of carrying other people through a door she is not certain she ever walked through.

She sets the last eight down and stands in the middle of an empty room with her hands empty too.

You know the chairs. Yours might be a sign-up sheet with your initials down the whole column, or a phone that rings when a marriage is going down, or a name badge with a title on it, or thirty years of being the one who stays. And you know the question underneath, the one that stands up the moment the room is finally quiet, and exactly why it has never left your mouth.

He did not stop the conversation

Come with me into another room at another late hour, because Scripture put one there for exactly this.

A man named Nicodemus walked across Jerusalem in the dark to ask Jesus something. A Pharisee. A ruler of the Jews. A teacher of Israel, which is to say a man who explained the things of God to other people for a living, the way our woman has explained them for thirty years with her hand between somebody's shoulder blades. And he could not follow what Jesus meant by being born again. He said so, out loud, twice.

And then Jesus said the sentence that by every rule of that conversation ought to have ended it.

If I have told you earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you heavenly things?John 3:12

You are standing at the exact place where everybody expects the door to swing shut, and it is written that the door did not swing shut. Read the next verse, and the one after it, because He kept talking. He went on and told the heavenly thing anyway. The Holy Spirit saw to it that the whole of that night went into the record, so a woman alone in a hall could read what came after the hard question and see that nothing was withdrawn.

Watch what He did with him. He did not send him back to the council to ask it in daylight, and He never said one word about the visit to anybody. He went straight past the earthly things into the heavenly ones and gave that man, at that hour, the sentence the world has recited ever since: that God so loved the world He gave His only Son. It was said in the dark to one tired, honest man who could not follow the argument.

You have the whole of that night on the page in front of you, and not one line of it was tidied up afterward. His word kept the awkward question in, kept a teacher of Israel not understanding in, and the same Spirit who carried that record down to this hall is not embarrassed by an unfinished question at ten at night.

Fluent in the earthly things

Now hear what Jesus was naming, because this is where people get it wrong and hurt themselves with it.

Earthly things are the things a person can see and check. Wind in the trees. Water. Birth. A building. Nicodemus was fluent in them, the way the very best teachers are, and our woman is fluent in more of them than anyone in that church knows. Which switch is which. Who to call when a family goes quiet for two weeks. How to stand behind a shaking person and not move.

The new birth is not on that list and was never meant to be. It is not a skill she failed to pick up. Listen to how John says it, right at the front of his Gospel, about everyone who receives Christ:

who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.John 1:13

Not of blood: it does not run down a family line, however many generations of hers have sat in this hall. Not of the will of the flesh: no amount of effort manufactures it. Not of the will of man: no preacher, no prayer team, no hand on a shoulder, however anointed, performs it on somebody. But of God. Which is why she cannot find it filed anywhere in her competence. It was never filed there.

You were never the one who could have done this, and the word says so as a comfort and not as a verdict. Scripture puts the new birth in the hands of God alone, and the Spirit who blows where He wishes has never once checked a person's fluency before He moved.

And notice what Jesus did not do in that room. He did not tell Nicodemus where he stood. There is no ruling on the man anywhere in the chapter. He answered him and let him walk home in the dark holding an answer instead of a verdict. Nicodemus turns up twice more, still on that council, insisting a man be given a fair hearing, and then at a tomb in daylight with seventy five pounds of spices in his arms.

You have a Lord who answers instead of assessing, and He has never handed a single person a file at the door. It is written that He knew what was in man and received the one who came at night regardless, and it is His Spirit, not the wording of a question, that makes a room safe to ask in.

Thirty years of holding other people up

Now the part I know something about, because I keep the third watch, and the watch teaches one thing above everything else: the one holding everybody else up is the one nobody thinks to hold.

There is a particular loneliness in it, and it is not unkindness. It is that a role hardens around a person. The woman they send for cannot be the woman who asks, because the asking would rearrange the whole room, and she has given thirty years to making that room work. So the question goes in the cupboard with the cloths.

You have carried other people to a door you were not certain you had walked through yourself, and that is not hypocrisy, it is thirty years of obedience with an open question inside it. Scripture nowhere requires a person to have their own account settled in writing before they may stand in the gap for somebody else, and the Spirit who intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words was doing the carrying the whole time.

But hear the second half, because it is the whole reason Nicodemus is in the Bible. He did not bring the council's question. He brought his own, in the first person, badly, in the wrong words, and got answered for it.