Sitting Down Before Dark

There is a chair on the porch and nobody has ever sat in it.

It is a good chair. His daughter bought it for him three birthdays ago, and the cushion has faded on one side from the sun the way a cushion does when it is left out and never turned. From the road you would say that is a man's chair, that is where he reads the paper, that is where he watches the road in the evening.

It is four in the afternoon in the second week of June, and Owen comes around the corner of the house with a bucket in his hand and sees it.

He does not stop. He has never once stopped. What happens instead is a small piece of business that takes about two seconds and has been happening every afternoon of his adult life: his eye goes to the chair, something in him leans toward it, and then he remembers the gate hinge. There is always a gate hinge. Some days it is the hinge, some days the downspout, some days the third row of beans that could stand weeding. He puts the bucket down, goes and gets the screwdriver, and by the time he is at the gate the chair is behind him and the whole thing is over.

He is not a workaholic and he would laugh at you for saying so. He sits down at supper. He sits down at church. He sits in the truck for an hour on Wednesdays. What he does not do, what he has never done, is sit down out in the open while there is light in the sky, and if you asked him why he would look at you a second too long and say, well, there is daylight left.

And then, if you kept quiet the way you do when you want a man to keep going, he might add something like: my dad never sat down.

But that is not it, and he knows it is not it, because his dad had a chair by the wood stove and sat in it plenty. It is not a memory. It is not a rule anybody ever spoke to him. If you handed him a sheet of paper and asked him to write out who made this rule and when, he would sit at the table a long time and the sheet would still be blank. He cannot source it. It is just there, and it has the full weight of law, and he has kept it faithfully for forty years.

You are the one with the bucket.

Maybe not a chair. Maybe you do not eat until everybody else has. Maybe you never take the first one. Maybe you cannot leave the kitchen while there is one thing on the counter. Whatever your version is, notice this: you obey it exactly, you have never questioned it, and if a court asked you to produce the author you could not do it.

And I want to say one thing plainly before I say anything else. The years you kept it were not wasted and I am not going to stand on your porch and call them foolish. A man who works while there is light has fed people. There is real honor in what those forty years built, and none of it comes down because a rule inside it turns out to have nobody's name on it.

Who was it made for

There is a scene where the men with Jesus walk through a grain field on the Sabbath and pull off heads of grain as they go, and the religious men come to Him about it.

He does not argue the details. He says one sentence that turns the whole thing around like a wagon in a narrow lane.

And he said to them, "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath."Mark 2:27

Made for man. That is a direction, and the direction is the whole point. God gave a day of rest as a gift going one way, from Him toward people, and the men in front of Jesus had it running the other way, with the people serving the day. Same day. Same law on the page. Completely opposite thing, because the arrow got turned around and nobody noticed the moment it happened.

That is not my permission to hand out and I would not presume to. It is written down in Mark 2, and the Holy Spirit is the one who reads a direction into a porch at four in the afternoon: you were made to receive rest rather than to supply it, and that has been the arrangement since the seventh day, and it did not stop being the arrangement while you were busy.

Now notice what Jesus does not do in that field. He does not audit the rule's paperwork. He never asks the religious men where they got it, or when it started, or who taught it to them, and He does not make anybody explain themselves before He lifts anything. He states the direction and the weight comes off in the same breath.

That is a mercy and it lands right on you, because you cannot produce the author either. You have half wondered whether you are allowed to put down a rule you cannot even name. You have never been required to trace it in order to be free of it, because Scripture puts the whole weight on what the day was made for and none of it on your investigation, and the Spirit of God is not waiting on a source before He speaks.

He said it to working men, with the work still coming

Here is the part I love, and it happens on a bad day, not a quiet one.

The disciples have come back from being sent out. People are arriving and leaving in such numbers that the text says the men had no leisure even to eat, which any working man understands without a commentary. The demand is real and it is not slowing down.

And he said to them, "Come away by yourselves to a desolate place and rest a while."Mark 6:31

He said that while the work was still coming. Not after the last of it. Not when the yard was clear and the hinge was fixed and every last thing was squared away, because that afternoon was never going to arrive, and He knew it, and He said it anyway.

His word carries no clause requiring a man to stay on his feet until dark, and His Spirit has never once quietly added one: this is yours in the second week of June with the beans unweeded, because Mark 6 has the Lord Himself telling working men to sit while the work was still walking up the road.

I know what the objection is, because I can hear it from here. If I sit down, things slide. Friend, listen. Nobody is asking you to become another man. There is no new rule going up on the porch to replace the old one, and I am not handing you a schedule or a quota of rest to fail at. The old rule had no author. What is being lifted is a weight, and lifting a weight does not put a different weight in its place.

One thing straight out, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If the standing has stopped being about the hinge, if it is now the thing that keeps you from having to sit alone with your own thoughts, and those thoughts have gone somewhere dark, tell one human being today, and reach the crisis line where you live if there is any danger to you at all. Sitting down beside somebody who knows is one of the ordinary things free men do.