One Hour in That Chair

The tea has been on the side table for eleven minutes and Tom has not picked it up.

There are two chairs in this room, both of them turned a little toward the window because somebody decided years ago that the view of the car park was better than the view of the door. His dad is in the one on the left with a blanket over his knees that he did not ask for and does not appear to notice. The window is open two inches. From out there comes the sound of somebody reversing a delivery van, and the beeping of it, over and over, and neither of them says anything about it.

His dad looked up when Tom came in. He looked up the way you look up when anyone comes into a room. Polite. A little pleased. The face of a courteous man being visited by somebody nice from the church, which is the face Tom has been getting since about February.

So they are twelve minutes in and there are, if he is honest with himself, forty eight to go.

He knows he could leave. Nobody would stop him and nobody would even know. But he has done that twice and the drive home afterwards was worse than any hour in this chair has ever been, so he sits.

And this is the part that is hard to say out loud without it sounding like self pity, which it is not. Tom is not sad in this chair. He is something more awkward than sad. He is exhausted, in a way that has nothing to do with sleep, because sitting in this room means holding four years up in the air the whole time.

Four years of it. The appointments. The letter from the consultant that he read twice in a hospital car park and then folded and put in the glove box, where it still is. The argument with his sister about the house, the one that ended with a phone going down and three months of nothing. The night he decided about this place, on his own, at his kitchen table, with the paperwork spread out and nobody to ask. And the visit in September when his dad called him Bill, and Bill is his uncle, and his uncle has been gone since Tom was a boy.

All of it comes into this room with him. It comes in through the door on his shoulders and it sits down with him and it is still here at minute twelve, and it is heavier than his father is.

Out in the corridor a trolley goes past. His dad watches the door and then looks back out at the car park.

The tea is going cold and Tom is looking at his own hands and doing arithmetic about how long an hour is.

Grace with a timestamp on it

There is a line in Hebrews that people quote at each other constantly and almost never finish.

Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.Hebrews 4:16

Grace to help in time of need. The old commentators loved that phrase and they were right to, because underneath it is a word that means well timed. Timely help. Help that arrives at the hour it is required and not before it, the way a rope reaches a man at the point he is actually over the edge rather than being handed to him in the car park in case.

Which explains something that has confused a great many honest people. A man sits outside a building like this in his car and tries to work up whatever it is he thinks he is meant to have, and finds nothing there, and concludes something grim about himself. But the grace for the room is not issued in the car park. It is issued in the room. He is standing outside a door trying to feel a supply that has not been dispensed yet, because the need has not started yet, and then he reads his own empty hands as a verdict.

You are not missing something you were supposed to have brought. The written word says grace to help in the time of need, which places the arrival and the need at the same moment, and the Holy Spirit is the One who carries it across the threshold with a man rather than handing it to him the day before.

And notice how the verse says to come. Boldly. Not sheepishly, not with a case prepared, not once the applicant has improved. The throne is called a throne of grace, which is a description of what is dispensed there and of the terms on which it is dispensed. You have a standing invitation to walk up to it exactly as you are at this minute. Scripture puts the boldness on the approach rather than on the person approaching, and the Holy Spirit is the One who walks a tired man up to a throne without first tidying him.

Four years do not fit through that door

Here is the thing that makes an hour like this feel impossible, and it is worth being precise, because precision helps.

It is not the hour. Sixty minutes of sitting beside a quiet man watching a car park is, in itself, nothing. Any of us could do it. What makes it unbearable is that Tom is not carrying sixty minutes. He is carrying four years, folded up and brought in through the door on his back, and then he is measuring his own capacity against the whole of it and finding it short, which of course it is, because nobody was issued four years' worth of anything.

The consultant's letter is not in this room. It is in a glove box. The argument with his sister is not in this room. The night at the kitchen table with the paperwork is four years back down a road and it is not being asked of him again. Not one of those things is happening at seventeen minutes past four on a Thursday in a chair by a window.

You are being asked for this hour, and this hour is all that has been asked. Hebrews 4:16 hands out help sized to the time of need, and the Holy Spirit does not draw down a supply for a decade and set it in front of a man who has to get through until five.

There is a mercy in how small that is, and it takes some getting used to. A man wants provision for the whole thing, because provision for the whole thing would let him stop being afraid. What he is given instead is enough for the room he is in, which requires him to come back for more, which is not a design flaw. It is the point. You were made to receive rather than to store, and there is no shame anywhere in that arrangement. The written word describes a throne a person comes to, over and over, and the Holy Spirit is not keeping a tally of how often somebody turns up.