Pull the Chair Out and Sit Down

For three years Alicia has been standing behind a chair at a table where nobody has ever suggested she should not sit.

She arrives. She is greeted properly, by name, by people who are glad. She helps. She is extremely good at helping, and helping is a wonderful way to be in a room without being in it.

And then, at the point where everybody sits down, she is behind a chair with her hands on the back of it, saying something about the water jug, and by the time she has dealt with the water jug the conversation has started and it would be strange to interrupt it by sitting.

So she stays there, or she finds another jug, and the meal goes on.

Nobody has ever noticed. That is not a criticism of them. A woman on her feet at a busy table looks like a woman being useful, which is the most invisible thing a person can be.

Here is what she is actually waiting for, and she could not have said it out loud until quite recently.

She is waiting to feel entitled.

Not permitted. She knows she is permitted. She has been told, warmly and more than once. She is waiting for the internal moment when sitting down would feel like a thing she was allowed to do rather than a thing she was getting away with, and she has assumed for three years that this moment arrives on its own, at the end of some process, when enough has passed.

Nobody has ever told her how long enough is, because nobody set it, because there is no process.

And in the meantime, the helping has become the thing she is known for, which is its own quiet trap. People rely on it now. If she sat down, somebody would have to notice, and somebody would have to do the jug, and she has arranged three years of Sundays so that neither of those ever has to happen.

She is not being kept out. She has become load bearing in a way that makes staying on her feet look like service instead of what it is.

And this is where I stop writing about Alicia, because you are standing behind something too.

I am not going to ask what happened. That is yours and it stays yours.

The verse with two facts in it

I want to give you a short verse that puts two things side by side and refuses to resolve them into each other, and that refusal is the mercy.

So Mephibosheth dwelt in Jerusalem: for he did eat continually at the king's table; and was lame on both his feet.2 Samuel 9:13

Read the two halves.

He did eat continually at the king's table. Continually is a word about frequency and about permanence: not invited once, not on special occasions. This is where this man eats now.

And was lame on both his feet.

The verse ends there. It does not say and then he was healed. It does not say and in time he grew into it. It puts the seat and the limp in one sentence and stops.

So take that where you stand with your hands on the back of a chair. You are eating continually at the King's table with the thing about you unresolved, and 2 Samuel 9:13 says both in the same breath, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a woman able to sit down before anything has changed.

And look at how he got there, because it is the answer to the entitlement question.

He was found. He did not apply. He was brought in on the strength of a covenant made between David and his father, before he was born, about which he had done precisely nothing. When he arrives he calls himself a dead dog, which is a man's own estimate of himself, and David does not argue with it and does not agree with it either. He just seats him.

The written word never once records Mephibosheth feeling entitled, and the Spirit of God has never made that a condition of anybody's seat.