The Chair I Keep Not Going To

It is eleven meters. He has measured it, which tells you something.

There is a chair at the front on the left where people sit when they want somebody to pray for them. It is not a big ceremony. It is a chair. Every week two or three people end up in it and nobody makes anything of it.

He has looked at that chair every Sunday for five years.

He wants to go. Let me be exact about this, because there is a version of this story where the man is proud and that is not this man. He is not proud. He would go on his knees if that was what it took. He has told God, alone, in his kitchen, at length, that he wants to go.

And every week the moment comes and it goes and he is still in his seat.

Here is what happens in his body during that ninety seconds, and he has never described it to anybody. His chest goes tight. His hands go to his knees. He becomes intensely aware of the exact number of people who would see him stand up, and of who they are, and of a specific person about four rows back who he thinks would think something.

And underneath all of it there is one thing, and it is not embarrassment, and it took him three years to identify it.

It is that if he goes and sits in the chair and nothing happens, then the thing he has been able to keep as a possibility for five years becomes a thing that has been tried.

He can bear waiting. He does not know if he can bear having gone.

So let me ask you.

What is the distance between where you sit and where you want to be?

Somebody had to tell him it was all right to come

There is a blind man sitting by a road out of Jericho and he hears who is coming past and he starts shouting, and the crowd tells him to be quiet.

That is the detail everybody remembers. The crowd shushing him.

And then Jesus stops, and something happens which I think is the most useful sentence in the passage for a man in a fifth row.

Jesus stopped and said, Call him. So they called to the blind man, Cheer up! On your feet! He is calling you.Mark 10:49

Read who says the encouraging part. It is the crowd, and it is the same crowd. You are being called rather than assessed, my friend, and the Holy Spirit has not once run those eleven meters as an examination.

Look at who says that.

They. The same crowd. The exact same people who were telling him to be quiet thirty seconds earlier are now the ones saying cheer up, on your feet.

Jesus did not go to him. He could have. He was standing right there and the man was blind and the distance was small, and the Son of God chose instead to send the crowd to fetch him.

And notice what the crowd actually says, because it is not instruction and it is not theology. It is three short things in a row and all of them are encouragement.

Cheer up. Somebody has to tell you that, because a man on the edge of a road with his coat over his knees does not generate that on his own.

On your feet. Physical. Practical. Get up.

He is calling you. The reason. Not because you have earned it and not because you deserve to be heard. Because He is calling.

Now hear where you stand in it.

You are not waiting for permission you have not got. Scripture says the crowd told a shouting blind man to cheer up because he was being called, and the Spirit has never once left a person on the edge of a road because the walk was too far.

And I want to speak to the real thing, my friend, and not the surface of it.

You are not afraid of standing up in front of people. You are afraid of the possibility running out. As long as you have not gone, the chair is still full of everything it might be, and I understand that completely, and it is one of the most human things there is.

But look at the next line in that chapter. The man throws his cloak aside and jumps up.

A blind beggar's cloak is his floor, his bed, his shelter and the thing he collects coins in. It is the entire apparatus of his waiting. And he throws it off before he has received anything at all, and he does it while he is still blind, and nothing in the text says he was confident.

He was called. That was enough to get him up.

And you are being called rather than assessed. Mark 10 says the crowd told a blind man to cheer up and get on his feet because he was being called, and the Spirit He poured out never once treated a walk to the front as a hearing where a case gets decided.