After Close, With the Chairs Up

The chairs go up at ten and he has been sitting in the one chair still down for an hour and twenty minutes.

He is fifty-nine. He has run this room for twenty-two years and there is not a square foot of it he has not repaired, painted, cleaned or cursed at. He knows the sound the compressor makes when it is thinking about failing. He knows which table wobbles. His wife is at home and thinks he is doing the books.

He is not doing the books.

Three days ago he found something out about his son. Not a rumor. Not something somebody told him. He found out, in the way a person finds out, and he cannot unfind it out, and he has not said one word about it to anybody on this earth including the boy.

Except the boy is not a boy. He is twenty-eight. He has his own place and his own life and he is a grown man, and that is the part that has him sitting in a chair in an empty restaurant at half past eleven at night. Because if his son were nine, there would be something to do. A father with a nine-year-old has a job. A father with a twenty-eight-year-old has a phone number and no jurisdiction and a great deal of love with nowhere to put it.

And so he sits.

He has been through everything already. Whether he should have known. Which year it started. What he did wrong in 2009. Whether his wife knows and is doing this same arithmetic somewhere in the house without him. Whether saying anything would help or would end something. Whether saying nothing is love or cowardice, and how a man is supposed to be able to tell the difference at half past eleven with the chairs up.

He has not cried. He is not sure why not.

And you know that room. You found out about somebody you love, and there is no procedure. Nobody hands you one. And whatever the thing itself is, the part nobody warned you about is the first few days, when you are carrying something enormous around a completely ordinary life and everybody you pass has no idea.

So take this in before we go one line further, because you have been alone with it for three days. You are not alone in this room and you have not been since the moment you found out. Psalm 34:18 says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, and it is a report on where He is rather than an offer you have to take up, and the Holy Spirit is sitting in this restaurant with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

Where He already is

There is a line in the thirty-fourth psalm that does something most comfort does not do, and the difference is the whole reason this article can be written at all.

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

It is a location, not an invitation. It does not say draw near and He will come. It does not say if you can manage to pray properly, He will meet you. It says where He is, in the present tense, as a matter of fact, and the people He is near to are not described as faithful or strong or coping well. They are described as broken.

Which means the qualifying condition, if you want to call it that, is the one thing you already meet.

You are somebody God is near to right now, and you did nothing to arrange it. The written word puts His nearness in the indicative and attaches it to brokenness rather than to performance, which means three days of not praying and not crying has not moved Him one inch; and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been in this shop since the chairs went up.

And notice who the psalm was written by, according to its heading. A man hiding from a king, who had recently escaped by pretending to be out of his mind. This is not a line composed in a study by somebody with an orderly life. It is field notes.

The first days have their own weather

I want to say something about where you are specifically, because the first days are their own thing and almost nobody names them.

In the first days you are not deciding anything. You think you are, because your head will not stop, but you are not. You are absorbing an impact. The mind runs through every scenario at high speed and generates a great deal of what feels like thinking and almost none of it is usable, and that is not a defect in you, that is what a nervous system does after a blow.

Which is why you have sat here for eighty minutes and reached nothing. You were never going to reach anything tonight. Nobody does.

You are not failing to handle this, and there was nothing to handle in the first three days. Isaiah 42:3 says a bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench, and both halves are about what He declines to do to somebody who is barely holding; His Spirit is doing that not-breaking at whatever pace He keeps, and He is not evaluating how you are managing.

And there is a second thing, and it is the one that needs saying most plainly. What you found out is not a report about your fathering. Every parent in your position runs the same audit, and the audit feels like responsibility and it is not responsibility, it is grief looking for a place to attach. A grown man's life is his own. You did not build it and you are not running it and the fact that you would take it all onto yourself right now, at midnight, in an empty restaurant, is a description of how much you love him and not a finding about 2009.

You are not being asked to carry what was never yours, and nobody with any standing has put it on you. Ezekiel 18:20 says the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son, and it is stated as a settled principle rather than as consolation; the same Spirit who had that written is the one keeping a man upright in a chair at half past eleven.

And here is the part I will not soften. Three days is long enough to be alone with this. Find a real person this week, not to get advice and not to decide anything, but so that one other human being on earth knows what you are carrying. A pastor, a friend of thirty years, a counselor, a doctor if the nights are getting bad. If it is heavier than that, if you are somewhere darker than tired, call someone tonight, and in the United States you can dial or text 988 and a person will answer.

There is nothing to do tonight, and that is not failure

Here is what I want to hand you, and it will sound like less than you wanted.

There is nothing to do tonight. Not because the situation is hopeless, but because tonight is not when anything gets done. What you have tonight is a chair, a room you have kept for twenty-two years, and a decision about whether you go home at midnight carrying this entirely alone or whether by the end of the week you do not.

That is the whole of it. Not what to say to him. Not whether to say anything. Whether you are the only one who knows.

You are not required to solve anything to be held tonight, and the holding is not conditional on a plan. Scripture says He is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, and near is a position rather than a reward; the Holy Spirit is the one who kept you in that chair instead of driving home at ten and lying awake.

So the shop is not an empty room. It is a man sitting under a light with someone beside him he cannot see, and a son he loves who is twenty-eight and whose life is his own, and a night that does not have to produce anything.