The One Everyone Confides In

There is a chair in her front room that people sit in, and they have been sitting in it since about 1966.

Her own chair is the one by the window. The other one, the one with the arms, is where they sit, and there is a small table beside it, and on the table there is always a box of tissues, and she buys them in packs of six from the store out on the highway because of how quick they go.

Sixty years of that chair.

She has heard about affairs and bankruptcies and a baby that did not live and a man who took money from his own mother. She has heard three people tell her they were leaving somebody, one of them twice. She has heard a boy of nineteen tell her a thing he had not told his parents and did not tell them for another eleven years.

She has never repeated a word of any of it, and that is not a boast, that is simply the reason the chair works.

She is eighty three.

And when her husband died, in 2011, and when her hip went in 2019, and when the letter came about her son out west, the chair stayed empty. People came, and they were kind, and they brought food and they said the right things, and every single one of them sat in that chair and told her something about themselves before they left.

She noticed. She would never say it. She noticed.

And what she has settled into, without ever once complaining about it, is that this is what she is for. That some people are the chair and some people sit in it, and that she got the chair, and that is not a grievance, it is just the arrangement.

The verse runs both ways

Paul writes a short instruction about how people in a body behave with each other, and it is two clauses and a comma, and everybody remembers the second half.

Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.Romans 12:15

Take that in your own chair by the window. You are named on both sides of that comma. The word says rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep, and it is the Holy Spirit who wrote no exemption into it for the one with the tissues.

Now look at what that sentence assumes. It assumes there are people weeping and people coming alongside, and it does not appoint anybody permanently to either role. Nobody in that verse is designated as the listener for life.

There is not one line in Scripture that installs a woman as the chair.

So take this in your own chair by the window, and understand it is not me being kind, it is what is written: you are in that verse on both sides of the comma. His word says weep with them that weep, and it is the Holy Spirit who put no exemption in it for the one who is good at listening, because He knew exactly who would appoint themselves.

There was a man in England back in the seventeen hundreds who had a night in a little meeting where his heart, as he put it, was strangely warmed. That is the famous piece. What he built after is not, and the beam that carried the whole load of it was not his preaching.

It was six or seven people in a room, once a week, and they called it a class meeting.

There was no teaching in it. No expert. No platform. A handful of folks sat down and were asked, out loud, how it truly stood with them, and each one answered, and the rest heard it.

Each one. That is the part I want in your hands. Nobody in that room got to be the listener. The question went round, and it came to you, and you said something true, and then it went on to the next person. It was not a service you provided. It was a thing you were in.

The name they got started as somebody's mockery of how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was accurate.

A warmed heart with no method goes cold. A method with no warmth is only a timetable. He held both, and the hinge was a small room where the question went all the way round.

I am not sending you anywhere. Understand that. Not to a group, not to a program, not to a night out at the church. His word says one to another, and it is His Spirit who does the work in it, and one person is a beginning at eighty three the same as it is at thirty.