The One Who Sets Up the Chairs

She has a key. That is how it started, about eleven years ago, and everything since has followed from the key.

She is there at quarter to eight. She does the chairs, which is ninety of them and takes about twenty minutes if nobody is helping, and usually nobody is helping, and she has stopped minding that because minding it takes energy she needs for the chairs.

She does the urn. She does the thing with the door that has to be done in a certain order. She knows where the spare bulbs are and she is the only one who does.

At the other end she is there until twenty past ten stacking, and then she drives home and eats something standing up.

People thank her constantly. She is thanked by name from the front twice a year and she goes red both times. Two or three people every single week say something warm, and they mean it, and she believes them.

And in eleven years nobody has asked her how she is.

Not once, in the sense she means. People ask in passing and she says fine and they move on, which is the ordinary machinery of a room and is nobody's fault. What she means is that nobody has ever put a hand on her arm and asked as though they intended to stand there for the answer.

She noticed it in April and she has not been able to stop noticing it since.

The sentence, unsaid: I am the arrangements and not one of the people.

You may know that room. Thanked constantly, and never once asked.

Somebody noticed before anybody complained

There is a short scene in Mark that most people read past, and it is one of the few places in the book where Jesus notices something nobody had raised with Him.

The disciples come back from being sent out. They are full of what happened. There is a crowd, and the crowd is coming and going constantly, and Mark records a detail that has nothing to do with the theology of the passage and everything to do with the state of the people in it.

They had no leisure so much as to eat.

And this is what He says.

Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while.Mark 6:31

Nobody asked Him for that. There is no complaint recorded. Nobody says they are tired. He observes the coming and going, He notices that they have not eaten, and He initiates.

You are being noticed by somebody who does not wait to be told, and Mark 6:31 has Jesus raising it Himself before anybody mentions it, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a detail about people who had no time to eat and lands it on a woman driving home at twenty five past ten.

Come ye yourselves

Consider the exact wording, because there are two small words in it doing an enormous amount of work.

Come ye yourselves. Not send the crowd away, which is a different instruction He gives at other times. Not manage things better. Come, you, yourselves. He separates them from the function they have been performing and addresses them as people.

That is precisely the distinction she has lost in eleven years. She has become the arrangements. She is thanked as the arrangements, warmly and sincerely and by name from the front, and there is no vocabulary in the room for her as a person because nobody needed one.

You are being addressed as yourself and not as the arrangements, because the written word has Him say come ye yourselves rather than get the work done better, and His Spirit is what turns two small words into something that reaches a woman stacking chairs.

And notice that He does not tell them to fix it, or delegate, or become more efficient. He tells them to come apart and rest a while. The instruction is entirely about them and contains no task at all.

You are being given something with no job attached to it, and Mark 6 puts rest in the imperative with no productivity anywhere in the sentence, and the same Spirit who moved Mark to record a detail about eating is the one who fills.

Where the load is bigger than one person

I want to stop and say something plainly, because this site will not praise anybody for absorbing what one person cannot absorb.

Eleven years of arriving first and leaving last with nobody ever asking is a real weight, and the fact that it is a pleasant weight made of good things does not make it lighter. Tell a doctor plainly how tired you actually are, including the eating standing up, rather than waiting to be asked. Ask a friend outside that building, directly and without softening it, to be somebody who asks how things really are and means it, because that is a request a person is allowed to make. And ask one other person to do the chairs one week in four, which is a small ask and a large change.

And if the tiredness has begun going somewhere heavier than tiredness, or the thought of not being here has started to feel restful rather than frightening, dial or text 988 in the United States, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and talk to a person tonight.

Asking to be asked about is not a failure of humility. You are held exactly as much on the week somebody else stacks the chairs as on the eleven years you did, because Mark 6:31 has Jesus initiating rest for people who never requested it, and it is His Spirit who makes that true in the body rather than only as a sentiment.