Six People and a Lot of Chairs

Ffion counted them from the water, which she has never admitted to anybody, and there were six.

Her mother. Her mother's friend Anne, who came to everything. The two who were doing it. A man she did not know who turned out to be there to fix the boiler and stayed out of politeness. And a woman from the choir who was setting up for something later and sat down at the back for it.

Six people and about a hundred and forty chairs.

It had been a Saturday, which was the problem, and it had been moved twice, which was the other problem, and by the time it landed on a date her brother was away and two of her friends had something and her father, who would have come, was already ill by then although nobody had said the word yet.

None of it was anybody's fault. She has been over the logistics of it enough times to know that.

But she was twenty-three, standing in water in front of a hundred and thirty-four empty chairs, and something went into her that morning that has never entirely come out.

She read the room. She could not help it. Everybody reads a room.

And what the room said, in the language rooms speak, was: this is a small thing that is happening to a person who does not matter very much.

She is fifty now. Her father died the following spring. She has a good life and she does not think about it often, and about twice a year, usually in a church, watching somebody else's, she will suddenly be back on the step counting.

You may have your own empty chairs.

Maybe it was a wedding, or a leaving do, or a hospital corridor, or a morning in the water on a badly chosen Saturday. And you looked round, and the room told you what you were worth, and you believed it because rooms are very convincing.

I am not going to tell you the six were enough

I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this that would insult you.

I am not going to tell you that six was plenty really. It was not what you wanted. You wanted your brother there and you wanted your friends and you wanted your father, who was going to be dead in nine months and would have loved it, and none of that is a small thing to have missed and I am not going to smooth it over.

The absence was real. You are allowed to have wished it were otherwise for twenty-seven years.

What I am going to question is the sentence you took from it, because the sentence was not in the evidence.

The room told you the event was small. That was an inference, drawn on a Saturday, by a twenty-three year old, from a diary clash and a boiler.

And the size of the room was never a reading on the size of the thing. The written word gives the greatest baptism there ever was without one word about attendance, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman who has been counting chairs since she was twenty-three.

The arithmetic you did was incomplete

Now here is the sentence I actually want to put beside it, and I want to be careful how I hand it over, because it can be said cheaply.

Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses.Hebrews 12:1

Compassed about. Surrounded. And the writer does not say it might be so, or that it will be one day. He says it as a present, settled fact about where the reader is standing while they read.

I am not going to embroider that. I am not going to tell you who was in the room or paint you a picture of the balcony, because I do not know and neither does anybody who says they do.

What the verse establishes is much simpler and much harder to shake. You did your count from the water and your count came to six, and the count was taken with the only instrument you had, which was your eyes.

And your eyes were never the whole census. The word says we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses and puts it in the present tense as a fact rather than a comfort, and the Spirit is the one who makes that steady rather than sentimental.

And you are not somebody a room gets to price. The word says fear not, for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name, thou art mine, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit about a value that was set somewhere other than a Saturday.

The other one in the water

There is something else and it is smaller and I think it might be the one that actually gets you.

You have been counting the people watching.

You have never once counted the One you were going under to.

He was not in the hundred and forty. He was not one of the six either. Whatever else was true of that room, the entire event was addressed to Him, and the register you have been keeping for twenty-seven years does not have a line for the person it was all for.

And He was present and He was not in your count. The word says lo, I am with you alway, and He says it without conditions about turnout, and the Spirit is the one who makes a present tense promise present rather than theoretical.

And nothing about that morning is under review. The word says he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it, and the Spirit supplies that confidence, which is not a thing a person reasons into from a wall at sunset.