The Row That Empties

There is a row near the front that has three seats of space in it, and the space is always in the same place.

It is around a boy of about nine and the woman who brings him.

He is not naughty. I want to be careful how I say this, because the way people usually say it is unkind and it is also wrong. He is not being disruptive on purpose. He makes noise the way other people breathe, in bursts, at the wrong moments, loudly, and sometimes for no reason anybody outside his own head could name.

His mother has a bag with things in it that help. She has been doing this a long time. She has a system and she has a face she puts on and she has, by now, an entirely automatic reaction to the sound of a chair moving behind her.

Nobody in that building has ever said anything to her. Everybody is nice to her. Several people have told her, sincerely, that they are so glad she comes.

And every single week, three seats of space.

Nobody decides it. That is what I need you to see. There is no meeting where it is agreed. People arrive, they scan the room the way everybody scans a room, and their feet take them somewhere with a bit of air around it, and by the time the music starts there is a small emptiness shaped exactly like a family.

She has counted it. Of course she has counted it. She could tell you the last time somebody sat directly beside her and how long they stayed.

Now put that row down for a second and think about your own feet.

Which row do you move away from without ever deciding to?

Paul used the strongest word he had

There is a sentence in the twelfth chapter of First Corinthians that people quote half of, and the half they leave out is the whole point.

On the contrary, those parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts that we think are less honourable we treat with special honour.1 Corinthians 12:22 and 23

Indispensable. Not tolerated. Not included. Not made welcome despite. Indispensable, which means the body does not work without them, which means the room you are in on a Sunday is not complete when that row empties, and the incompleteness is not hers.

Paul is not being sentimental. He is describing plumbing. He is saying that a body which quietly organizes itself away from its weaker parts is a body doing itself an injury and calling it tidiness.

And I want to say the encouraging thing before I say the hard thing, because you are not the villain here.

You are somebody whose feet move before their heart does. That is all this is. The word says the seemingly weaker parts are indispensable, and the Holy Spirit has been telling you that all year in the small unwelcome way He tells people things, which is why you are still reading. You have not been indicted. You have been noticed.

And you are far more able to do something about this than you feel, because it costs nothing. You are not being asked to counsel anybody, or to fix a diagnosis, or to know what to say. You are being asked to sit down.

That is the entire request. Sit down and stay sat down.

Because here is the thing about a row that empties: the sentence it speaks is much louder than anything anybody says at the door afterwards. Being told you are welcome and being given three seats of space in the same hour teaches a person which one to believe, and it is never the words.

This house is named for a fire that fell in a stable in 1906, and the thing witnesses could not stop writing about was not the noise in the room. It was who was in it. People sat down beside people they were not supposed to sit beside, and nobody had drawn up a policy, and the room preached louder than the preacher.

A room still does. Yours is preaching this Sunday whatever you decide.