She Counts The Empty Chairs

She comes in and her eyes go to the back before they go anywhere else.

Three rows. She knows exactly who used to sit in them. She could give you the seat and the name and roughly the year they stopped coming, and for two of them she could tell you the last thing they said to her in that doorway.

She does all of that before she has said good morning to a single living person.

Here is what happened about a month ago and she has not been able to put it down.

A woman took her hand in the doorway and said something.

She does not know what it was.

She was looking past her, at the fourth row from the back, working out that a particular family had not been in for three weeks and wondering whether anybody had rung them.

That woman was holding her hand and telling her something, and she has no idea what, and she has thought about it every Sunday since.

Because when she sat with it properly she understood something about the last two years.

There are people in that room who love her. They come every week. Some of them have carried her. And she has been standing in a room full of them, week after week, counting the ones who are not there.

She has not properly seen a face in about two years.

If you see the gaps before the people, come and get a coffee. Nobody in this hall is anywhere else.

What one day is worth

There is a psalm where somebody does a piece of arithmetic and comes out with an answer nobody would expect.

For a day in thy courts is better than a thousand. I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God, than to dwell in the tents of wickedness.Psalm 84:10

A day is better than a thousand.

That is a comparison of quantity, and the small number wins. He is not saying a day is nearly as good. He puts one against a thousand and says the one is better, which is either nonsense or it means the value is not coming from the number at all.

And then the doorkeeper. That is the least positioned job in the building, standing at the edge, and he would rather have that than anything on offer elsewhere.

You are in a place whose value the psalm refuses to calculate by quantity. Psalm 84:10 weighs one day against a thousand and awards it to the one, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept that arithmetic in the songbook rather than correcting it, which means what is happening in that hall this morning has never been measurable by how many chairs have somebody in them.

What the counting is actually doing

Now the three rows, and let us be honest about what that habit is, because it is not what it looks like.

It looks like love. It genuinely started as love. You noticed people were missing because you cared that they were missing, and somebody has to notice or nobody rings anybody.

But it has become a lens, and a lens decides what you see first.

For two years the first information entering your eyes on a Sunday has been absence. Everything else has arrived afterwards, through that, and by the time a face gets to you it is already competing with a list.

You have been loving people through a lens that shows you their absence before it shows you anybody's presence. Matthew 18:12 has a shepherd going after the one that is gone astray, and he goes after it rather than standing in the field counting it, and it is the same Spirit who leads a person to somebody who needs finding, which means the caring you have been doing was designed to move your feet rather than to occupy your eyes.

The woman in the doorway

Here is the part that hurts, and it should be handled gently rather than used as a whip.

A woman held your hand and said something and you missed it.

That is one moment. It is not two years of failure and nobody is going to turn it into that.

You were not absent from those people out of indifference, and nothing about that doorway is being counted against you. Psalm 103:14 says he knoweth our frame, he remembereth that we are dust, and it is written as the ground of God's tenderness rather than as an allowance, and it is the same Spirit who is called the Comforter, which means what happened in that doorway is being handled kindly and is not on a list anywhere.

What it is, is information. You now know the cost of the lens. That is a thing worth knowing and it took a month to arrive.