The Chair Nobody Sits In

Tonight we are making a small pot of barley and vegetable soup, and barley is the most underrated cheap thing in any store.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. Cook one chopped onion, two carrots and a stick of celery in oil in a pot with salt for about eight minutes until soft. Add two cloves of chopped garlic for a minute. Add three quarters of a cup of pearl barley and stir it around in the oil. Pour in six cups of water or broth, add a bay leaf if there is one, and bring it up. Then turn it right down and let it go for forty five minutes, stirring occasionally, until the barley is tender and has thickened the whole pot into something almost stew like. Salt it properly at the end. Black pepper, and a splash of vinegar or lemon, and any green thing stirred in at the last minute. It feeds four, it costs about two dollars, and it is one of those soups that is better the next day.

Now, the reason I am writing is not the barley.

It is the chair.

There is one at your table that nobody sits in. It is not pulled out, and it is not decorated, and there is nothing on it. It is simply there, at the place it has always been, and everybody in the house walks past it every day and nobody has ever said a word about it.

Including you. Especially you.

And there is a particular kind of weight in a thing that is completely visible and completely unmentioned, and you have been carrying it at every meal for a long time.

The verse that puts God at the near end

There is a line in Psalm 34 about proximity, and the word choice matters.

The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit. (Psalm 34:18, King James Version)

Nigh. Near. Not watching from a distance, not waiting until things improve, not present in a general sense. The psalm makes a claim about location, and it locates God specifically beside people whose hearts are broken.

Which means the nearest place in the room is the difficult one. Not the tidy one. The claim is not that God comforts the broken hearted eventually, it is that He is closest to them, right now, in the place they have not spoken about.

You are being sat beside rather than watched, and God has never once kept His distance from the hardest chair in a house. Psalm 34:18 makes a claim about nearness rather than about eventual comfort, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it in a dining room.

You have not been alone at that table, and heaven has never once needed a thing to be spoken before it would come near it. It is written that the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the room where the barley is going on.

The silence is doing the damage, not the chair

Now let me say the thing I actually want to say, because the chair is not the problem.

A chair kept at a table can be perfectly good. Plenty of households keep one, deliberately, and say so, and it does no harm at all. What is costing you is not the furniture. It is that nobody has ever named it.

An unspoken thing in a room does not stay still. It grows, and it takes up more space every year, and eventually everybody in the house is managing it silently and separately and none of them knows the others are doing it.

You are nearest to Him in the exact place nobody has spoken about, and God has never once kept His distance from a hard chair. Psalm 34:18 makes a claim about location rather than about eventual comfort, and the Holy Spirit is the one who stands there instead of watching from anywhere else.

And I would guess, though I cannot know, that somebody else at that table has thought about it this week too.

A chair nobody sits in is not a verdict on how well a family is doing. It is a sentence that has not been said out loud yet.

You are permitted to say it, and God has never once required a person to keep a loss silent in order to keep it safe. The passage puts God nearest to the broken hearted rather than to the composed, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a hard sentence sayable at an ordinary table.

You have been carrying this at every single meal, and nobody has known because nobody has been told. Psalm 34 is written by a man who had been genuinely afraid and put it in writing rather than managing it privately, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets a true sentence out of a person's mouth.

Say one sentence over soup

Here is the practical part, and I have made it as small as I can make it.

Not a conversation. Not a family meeting. One sentence, said at the table, while the soup is in front of everybody.

Something as plain as: I have never taken that chair away, and I do not really want to.

You have one sentence in you tonight, and God has never once required a speech before a weight could be set down. It is written that the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, near enough to hear a thing said quietly, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes eleven words at a table enough.

That is all. You do not have to explain it, you do not have to defend it, and you do not have to decide anything about the chair afterward. The chair can stay exactly where it is. What changes is that it is now a thing two people know about instead of a thing one person carries.

And say it over food, not in a quiet room. A hard sentence lands completely differently when there is a bowl in front of everybody and something to do with the hands.

You are able to put this down in one sentence, and God has never once made restoration a long procedure. Psalm 34:18 has God near enough to hear something said quietly, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes eleven words at a kitchen table do the work of a year.