The Seat That Stayed Empty

The trick with the coat is that you have to get there early, before the parents come in from the car park, and you have to lay it properly across the seat so it looks deliberate.

She is nine the first time she does it. Third row, on the aisle, because her mother gets restless and likes to be able to get out. She lays the coat out and smooths it and goes and sits with the others at the front where the players sit, and every time the doors go at the back she does not turn round, because turning round is what the little ones do.

Her mother said she would be there. She said it that morning at the kitchen door with her keys already in her hand, and she said it in the way that means it, because she did mean it. She has never once said it without meaning it.

The hall smells of floor polish and radiators. There are eleven of them playing and she is seventh.

She plays her piece and it goes well, and she stands up and does the small bow they were taught, and on the way back to her seat she has to walk past the third row, on the aisle, and pick up her own coat, because you cannot leave a coat at a school hall, and she carries it over her arm for the rest of the afternoon.

She does this seven times over six years. Grade exams, the Christmas thing, the summer concert, the one at the church with the good piano. Seven coats, seven aisles.

There is no villain in this. That is the part that took her until she was about thirty to work out. Her mother was not cruel and did not forget her on purpose, and the reasons, when they came, were true reasons, and there were always more of them than anybody could argue with.

The seat was just empty. That is all. It was empty every time, and it was empty in a particular way, because it had been promised.

She is thirty-eight now. Her daughter is eleven and plays better than she ever did, and there is a thing on Thursday at the school, six thirty, doors at six fifteen.

She has checked the time four times since Sunday. It is in her phone twice. She has told two people at work and moved a meeting.

And on Sunday night, sitting on the end of her bed with her phone in her hand, she noticed something that has bothered her all week, and it is not what you would expect.

She has no picture of it.

She knows exactly how to be the child on the stool looking at an aisle seat. She has thirty years of that. But she has no memory anywhere in her head of what it looks like from the seat: what a person does with their hands, what their face does, how early they arrive, whether they clap in the wrong place.

Nobody ever showed her. There is no example behind her anywhere.

She is going to be the first one in the seat, and she is going to have to do it without ever having watched it done.

The verse people only quote half of

There is a line in Psalm 27 that gets read as an accusation, and it is not one. It is the opposite. It is the tenderest sentence about a household in the whole psalm.

When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up.Psalm 27:10

Read it slowly and notice where the weight sits. Almost everybody quotes the first half and lets the second half trail off, and the first half is not the point. The first half is the situation. The second half is the verse.

The Lord takes me up. It is the language of somebody being gathered in and brought into a household, picked up off a doorstep and carried inside as one of the family, and David puts it in the middle of a psalm that is otherwise about enemies and armies, because it is the thing he wants said.

And notice that he does not spend a line on the parents. There is no case, no charge, no list. He states the fact in nine words and then turns immediately to what God did, and he stays there.

I am going to do the same, and I want to say plainly why. I am not putting your mother on trial in this message. Not because the seat was not empty, because it was, and I am not going to soften that by a single degree. But a prosecution takes about twenty years to run and it never once ends in a verdict that gives anybody their childhood back.

Take this instead, as spoken over you. You were taken up. That is not a consolation for what was missing; it is a different fact standing beside it, and Psalm 27:10 is the written word it stands on, and the Holy Spirit has been the One doing the taking up since long before you had language for it.

Somebody has to be first

Now the thing you worked out on the end of the bed on Sunday, because it is the real subject.

You have no picture of the seat. That is not a character flaw and it is not damage. It is simply an absence of precedent, and an absence of precedent is not the same as an absence of ability, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a template in order to teach somebody something.

Look at Abraham, who is the beginning of everything this site is about. His father served other gods. There is no line of faithful men behind him that he is continuing. When God speaks to him in Genesis 12 there is nothing in his family history to consult, no example to copy, no one to ring. He is told to get up and go to a land he has not seen, and he goes, and the whole covenant starts there.

Somebody is always first. And the first one never gets to watch it done.

That is the position you are in on Thursday at six fifteen, and it is a good position, and it is not lonely in the way it feels. You are standing in something that does not need a precedent to be valid, because it rests on an oath that God swore and not on a habit somebody in your family passed down. What is written is the ground under it and the Spirit of God is what makes it live in a woman who has no template, and neither of those depends on anything you inherited.

What goes in the place of it

I want to be careful here, because this is where messages about family go wrong and start handing people a fight.

There is no curse to break in this. That language would give the empty seat a power over you that it does not have and never had, and it would put you in a war with your own family on a Thursday evening when there is a daughter to get to a school hall.

What there is, is a space. A real one. A seat-shaped, third-row, on-the-aisle space that was supposed to have somebody in it and did not, seven times.

And God does not leave spaces like that empty and He does not ask you to pretend it was fine. He puts something in it. He put Himself in it. Every one of those seven afternoons, walking back to your chair with your own coat over your arm, you were being taken up by somebody who was not going to be anywhere else, and it is written in Psalm 27:10 that this is exactly what He does, and His Spirit was the one doing it in a school hall that smelled of floor polish while you were nine and not turning round.