The Chair With Nowhere to Put It

The chair is still in the kitchen. That is the part that gets her.

It is the fourth chair, the one with the wobble, and for about nine years it had a job. She would carry it round to the other side of the table and set it down beside whoever was working, and sit in it, and that was homework. Sums with a bitten pencil. A model of a Roman fort made out of cereal boxes. An entire Sunday on the water cycle.

She knew everything then. Not in a controlling way. She simply knew, because she was sitting there. She knew what they were reading. She knew the name of every child in both classes and which teacher was kind and which one shouted. If something strange came into the house, it came in through a door she could see.

They are fifteen and twelve now.

At ten past nine she goes up with a glass of water and stands on the landing, and behind two doors there are two people she would die for, being shaped, hour after hour, by conversations she is not in. She could ask. She does ask. She gets the answer teenagers have given since teenagers were invented, which is nothing, said politely.

She comes back down, and the chair is where it always is, and there is nowhere to put it.

So she does what she does at that hour, which is find things out. She reads. She looks up one careful question, and the answer raises two more, and by half past eleven she is further from the floor than when she started, holding a great deal of information and no ground at all.

And you know that landing.

Yours might have different doors on it. One child, or grown children, or grandchildren three counties away whose whole life reaches you through rooms you cannot walk into. But you know the exact shape of the fear, and here is the thing about it: it is not really a fear about the world. It is a fear about the edge of your reach. There is a line in your house now, and on one side of it you are the mother, and on the other side of it you are a woman on a landing holding a glass of water.

And nobody has ever told you what to do at the edge of your own reach.

The edge of your reach

David wrote a question once that he meant about himself, and it reads differently in a mother's hands.

Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.Psalm 139:7-8

He was talking about the impossibility of getting away. He meant it as a man: there is no corner of anywhere that I could reach first. Read it standing on a landing at ten past nine and it says something he was not thinking about, and it is still true, because a fact does not care which grief is holding it.

You are standing at the edge of your own reach, and you are nowhere near the edge of His. Psalm 139:7 asks whither shall I go from thy spirit, and it is a question built to have no available answer, and the Holy Spirit named in that verse is already sitting in the room you cannot walk into.

That is not a comfort about the future. It is a description of the present tense, of tonight, of two rooms in a house with the doors shut.

What the fear is actually about

Something has changed that you did not choose, and there is no honest way to pretend otherwise. Whatever is forming your children in there, you did not select it, you cannot sit beside it, and you cannot follow it in.

But notice where the panic actually lives. It is not in the change itself. It is in a sentence underneath the change that goes: I am the one who was supposed to be there, and I am not there, and therefore nothing is.

That last step is the one that is not true. It has never been true, and it was not true when the chair was in daily use either, because the chair only ever covered the hours you were in it.

You have not been made redundant. Deuteronomy 6:7 gives a parent words to say sitting in the house and walking by the way and lying down and rising up, and nothing in it limits their working life to the hours you can see, and the Spirit carries sentences you said years ago into rooms you were never going to be in.

The water cycle Sunday is in there. The way you speak to somebody who serves you in a shop is in there. Every time they watched you apologize properly is in there. None of that was withdrawn when the doors started closing.

Blessing and commanding, and the difference

There is one more thing to be clear about, and it is the thing that ruins praying mothers when nobody says it.

You have authority, and it does not point at your children. Luke 10:19 hands over authority against the enemy and never over another person's will, and Scripture is careful about that distinction everywhere it appears, and the Spirit is the one who does work inside a fifteen year old that no mother was ever given the power to do from a landing.

So the fear gets commanded. The dread that arrives at ten past nine, the churning, the certainty that you are already too late, the compulsive reading: all of that is yours to speak to, and it has no covenant right to a room in your house.

The children get blessed. Not managed, not commanded, not prayed at as though they were a problem to be solved. Blessed, by name, out loud, the way you would have blessed them when they were four and sitting beside a chair with a wobble.

Those are two different actions and mixing them up is exhausting, because commanding a person you love is the one job that never finishes.

Standing on something that does not move

Now the reading, and this is said gently, because the reading is not a character flaw. It is a mother trying to build a floor out of the only material she can find at that hour.

The trouble is that information is a poor floor. It is not that it is untrue. It is that there is always more of it, so it can never be finished, and a floor you can never finish is not a floor, it is a staircase going down.

You are not required to understand a thing in order to have solid ground about it. Proverbs 3:5 says lean not unto thine own understanding, which is not an instruction to stop thinking but an instruction about what you put your weight on, and the Holy Spirit is what holds a person up on a landing after the reading has run out.

You will still think. Thinking is good and you are good at it. Just stop asking it to carry a load it was never built for.