Eleven Years Of Folding Chairs

The cart has a bad wheel and it has had a bad wheel since before Nelson started.

He gets to the hall on Vine Street at ten after six because the door sticks and the light switches are behind the stage, and he has never once been able to explain to anybody why both of those facts add up to twenty minutes. He wedges the door. He turns on the urn first, because the urn takes forever. Then he goes for the chairs.

Eighty four of them, seven rows of twelve, and a gap in the middle that people call the aisle although it is really just an absence of chairs. He does not measure the gap anymore. His arms know where it goes.

The speaker arrives at seven thirty with a folder and a bottle of water and a slightly nervous look, and Nelson says the same thing he says every week, which is that the microphone cuts out if you hold it too close, and the speaker says thank you, and then the evening happens.

Nelson sits at the back on the end. He can hear it fine from there. He is also the one who will notice if the door bangs, and the one who will slide out to catch the latecomer and point them at the chair with the space around it, and the one who has the spare batteries in his jacket pocket because of an evening in his second year that he would rather not repeat.

Then everybody stands up and talks in little knots by the urn, and Nelson starts folding.

It takes a while. Chairs go back on the cart in stacks of six, and the cart goes to the storage room, and the cart comes back, six more times. Halfway through, the speaker comes over, still holding the folder, and shakes his hand and says the thing people say, which is that they could not do it without him, and Nelson says not at all, and means it, and keeps folding.

By nine forty five the hall is a bare wooden floor with a scuff mark where the front row was.

Eleven years.

He is not bitter. That is the part people get wrong when they see him. He likes the hall. He likes the urn. He likes the sound of a room filling up.

But there is a sentence in him that arrived somewhere around year three, and it has never been said out loud, not to his wife, not to anybody, and it goes like this.

Somebody has to do the chairs, and it turns out to be the person with nothing else to bring.

He turns off the lights behind the stage. He unwedges the door. The cart squeals all the way to the storage room one last time, and he has stopped hearing it.

Look at the size of the words

There is a moment in one of the stories Jesus told where a man comes back from a long trip and settles up with the people who worked for him, and what he says to the first one has been read at a thousand funerals and misheard at most of them.

He does not say, you did more than you realized. He does not say, actually your part was the important one all along. He does not reframe anything. He looks straight at what was handled and calls it what it is.

A few things. Small. Not much.

And then, in the very same sentence, with no pause and no adjustment, he calls the man good and faithful.

You are counted faithful over a few things, and the few was never a downgrade in the arithmetic. Matthew 25:21 puts both words in one breath, few and faithful, and it is written that way deliberately. The Spirit does not wait for the number to grow before He agrees with a line like that over a man stacking chairs in sixes.

His master replied, "Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master's happiness!"Matthew 25:21

Most of us were taught to hear that verse as a sentence about the future, and to skim past the only part of it that is already true. The commendation is spoken first, over work that is finished, in a voice that has already made up its mind.

You have been assessed already, over exactly the things you actually did, and the assessment came back good. That is the written order of the words in Matthew 25:21, the verdict before the arrangement, and His Spirit says it in the present tense in a hall on a wet Tuesday with the urn still cooling.

The hall was always the material

Now let me be careful here, because there is a comforting move available and I am not going to make it.

I am not going to tell you that you are secretly the important one in that hall. That is not encouragement. That is the same ranking with your name moved to the top of it, and it would put you straight back into the business of being ranked, which is the business that produced the sentence in you in the first place.

The truth is better and quieter than a promotion.

When Jesus said that His people are the light of the world, He was sitting on a hillside in front of farmers and fishermen and mothers with children on their hips. Nobody in that crowd had a platform. Nobody had done a single thing about it yet. He was not describing their potential and He was not previewing the impressive versions of them. He was looking at the ordinary ones and stating a fact.

You are the light of the world on a wet Tuesday in a rented hall, and the supply was never yours to generate. Matthew 5:14 said it over people with nothing anybody would have written down, and it stands in the plain present tense. What the Spirit adds is that it is about you, tonight, in this hall, with the bad wheel.

Ordinary was not the leftover material after the good material ran out. Ordinary is the material. It is the only kind God has ever used at scale, because it is the only kind there is very much of.

You were never the small version of a bigger believer. Scripture does not grade the material that way; it says a few things and calls the person faithful in the same line, without softening either word. The word said it first, and His Spirit says it again in a room that smells of floor polish and instant coffee.