I Am In The Chair And I Am Not Here

You are in the room every evening and you could not describe it.

That is the thing that got you on Sunday. Somebody mentioned what your son had been wearing all week and you had no idea, and you have been in the same rooms as him every single day.

You are not distracted in a dramatic way. There is no crisis, nothing is going wrong, and if anybody watched you they would see a woman sitting with her family in a warm room.

Inside, there is a list. Tomorrow, the thing you forgot, the message you did not send, the appointment, the other appointment, the conversation you have to have on Friday.

The list is not indulgence. Somebody has to hold it and nobody else in the house does. It is the price of a household that functions.

But the price is being paid in the only currency that matters here, and you have started to notice the receipts.

I am not going to ask you to stop carrying the list. There is nowhere for it to go and pretending otherwise would be useless advice.

I am going to ask you for twenty minutes and one person, which is a much smaller thing and is available tonight.

Mary sat at Jesus feet and heard his word

There is a household in Luke where two sisters are doing two different things and only one of them gets described in a way anybody remembers.

And she had a sister called Mary, which also sat at Jesus feet, and heard his word. (Luke 10:39, King James Version)

Two verbs. Sat, and heard.

Not sat and listened attentively. Not sat and made the most of it. Sat, and heard his word, which are the two plainest things a person can do in a room.

You are a woman two feet from where you want to be, and sitting in a room has never once been the same thing as being in it. Luke 10:39 records two very ordinary verbs and nothing else, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a woman how short the distance actually is.

And notice that Mary is not doing anything impressive.

She has not solved anything, arranged anything, or produced anything. In household terms she is contributing nothing at all, and the passage names what she is doing with complete respect.

You have been measuring your presence by what it produces, and a woman sitting still has never once been a woman doing nothing. The Spirit of God is the one who takes the productivity test off somebody who has been applying it to herself for years, and it is written in Luke 10 that the sitting and the hearing were the whole of it.

And then the word heard, which is the one that matters for you.

Heard is not the same as being within earshot. It is the difference between the sound arriving and the person receiving it. Your son said something on Tuesday that arrived and was not received, and that is exactly the gap this verse is describing.

You are able to close a gap of about two feet, and a sound that arrived has never once been the same event as a word that was heard. It is written that she sat and heard his word, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ordinary sentence at a kitchen table land in somebody.

Pick one person

Here is the instruction, and its whole strength is that it is one person and not a room.

Choose one person before you sit down, and look at that person for the twenty minutes.

Not all of them. Not the room. One, chosen in advance, before anything starts.

You are able to do this for one person tonight, and one chosen face has never once been a smaller act than an attentive room. The Holy Spirit is the one at work in something as small as where a woman's eyes go, and Luke 10:39 puts one woman at one set of feet hearing one voice.

Here is why the room does not work as a target.

Attending to a room is a job. It means scanning, monitoring, keeping track of who is fine and who is not, and that is precisely the state a woman with a list is already in, and it is what has been eating the evenings.

One person is not a job. One person is company.

You have been trying to be present to five people and have arrived for none, and one face has never once been less than a room. The Spirit of God is the one who reduces something impossible into something available, and it is written in Luke 10 that the sitting was in one place, at one person's feet.

And do it with your face and not with your mind.

Look at them. When they speak, look at the person speaking, not past them. That is nearly the whole of it, because the eyes go where the attention is and the attention follows the eyes back.

You are able to send your attention after your eyes, and looking at somebody has never once been a small thing to do to a person. The Holy Spirit is the one who does something inside a woman who is only pointing her face at her own son, and Scripture records the sitting and the hearing as two plain physical acts.

What to do with the list

Now the list, because it will arrive about ninety seconds in and it will be loud.

Do not fight it. A list fought becomes the whole evening.

When it comes, notice it, and put it down the way you would put down a bag, and go back to the face. It will come again. Put it down again. That is the exercise and there is no version where it stops arriving.

You are not required to have an empty mind for this, and a list that keeps arriving has never once been proof that a woman is not present. The Spirit of God is the one who works in the putting down rather than in the absence, and it is written that Mary sat and heard, which is a description of a posture and not of a mental state.

And one practical thing, which helps more than resolve.

Write the list down before you sit. Not to deal with it, to park it. A written list argues less than a held one, because part of what it is doing is making sure you do not forget it.

You have a way to quiet something that costs two minutes, and a list on paper has never once had the same voice as a list in a head. The Holy Spirit is the one at work when a woman puts something down before she sits down, and Luke 10:39 has one person sitting with nothing in her hands at all.

Twenty minutes, one face, and the list on the counter.

You are able to do this tonight exactly as you are, and twenty minutes of one person being looked at have never once needed a woman to become somebody calmer first. It is written in Luke 10 that she sat and she heard, and the Spirit of God is the one who closes two feet.