They Are Waiting For The Old Me

The seating was decided about eleven years ago and nobody has revisited it since.

You are at the end of the long table, near the door, on the folding chair with the wobble, because that is where the one who arrives late sits and you arrived late once in two thousand and something and it became a fact about you. Your sister is at the other end where the responsible people go. Your cousin is beside her, in the seat of the one who is doing well.

Somebody hands you a plate and says, careful, do not drop it, and everybody laughs, including you, because it is a good joke and it has been a good joke for a long time.

They are not being cruel. That is what makes it so difficult to say anything about. These people would empty their accounts for you. Your uncle asks about work with real interest, listens to about a third of the answer, and then tells the story about the hotel car park, which is the story he has told at every gathering since it happened, and which stopped being funny to you in a way you cannot explain to anybody at this table.

You have been out for fourteen months.

Not out of the room. Out. Out of the thing that had you, all the way out, in a manner that took an intervention and a stranger and a night you will not be describing over a paper plate in a back garden.

Nobody here knows what to do with that.

So they have done the reasonable thing, which is to keep everything exactly where it was and wait. They are waiting for you to be the old one again, because the old one is who they know how to talk to. Every joke is a small invitation back to a chair you no longer fit in. Every story is a hand held out toward a version of you that died somewhere around last March.

And the terrible part, the part you would not say out loud to a single person in this garden, is how easy it would be.

You could pick it up in about four seconds. The voice, the shrug, the laugh half a beat too loud. It is right there, it fits, and everybody in this family would relax at once if you put it back on.

Somebody calls down the table asking whether you want another one, and you can hear in the way they ask it that they mean something specific, and you sit there on a folding chair with a paper plate on your knees, fourteen months out, being handed your own graveclothes by people who love you.

Out and untied are two different words

John 11:44 is the only genuinely honest sentence about the aftermath in the whole book, and it is short.

The man came out still tied up. The Holy Spirit had that written down on purpose, with the linen still on his hands and a cloth still over his face, because somebody was eventually going to need to know that out and free are not the same word. You are out, and you are still wrapped in places, and both of those are true at that table tonight.

And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes: and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him, and let him go.John 11:44

Notice who gets the job of untying, because this is the part that gets skipped in almost every retelling of it. Jesus does not tell Lazarus to sort out his own hands. In John 11:44 He turns to the people standing there, the neighbors and the relatives and the ones who had come for the mourning, and He gives the work to them. The Spirit of God has been assigning that same job to gardens full of relatives ever since. You have been trying to do with your teeth what was always meant to be done by other hands.

That room in your family was arranged a long time ago and nobody has been back to look at it. Scripture never once suggests that a household updates itself automatically, and the Holy Spirit is not startled by a table still working off the old seating plan. You were handed a role somewhere around nineteen years old and everybody has been reading from it since, including you, most of the time, out of pure habit.

And nothing here is going to tell you the after is the easy part.

Coming out of a tomb is one afternoon. Walking around afterward in a body that everybody remembers differently takes as long as it takes, and Philippians 1:6 has God completing what He started without attaching a date to it anywhere in the sentence. His Spirit does the finishing at His own pace rather than at the pace of anybody else's patience, including yours. You have been given time that you did not think you were allowed to take.

One plain paragraph here, because this category is where people go back in and everybody in recovery knows it. If sitting in that garden has brought up anything about ending your life or about quietly not being here, tell one living human being tonight, before the evening is over. In the United States, call or text 988. Anywhere else, emergency services, or the crisis line for where you live. That is not a failure of faith and nobody who makes that call becomes a burden to the person who answers it. God hands real rescue to people with phones and spare rooms and cars on purpose, and reaching for one of them is obedience rather than defeat.

Look at what is actually happening at a table where nobody has updated the file. Somebody passes you the joke like a plate. Somebody tells the hotel car park story in the voice it has been told in for years. 2 Corinthians 5:17 describes a new creation with the old things genuinely gone, and the Spirit of God is not consulting the family's back catalogue when He says it. You are not the thing they keep quoting.

Then there is the honest part about the risk in that garden, and it needs saying plainly rather than bravely. The old seat is comfortable. It is shaped to you, it requires nothing, and there is a version of this evening where you put the whole costume back on before the dessert. Hebrews 10:23 has a believer holding a confession while the One who promised does the actual keeping, and the Holy Spirit is the keeper in that sentence rather than the reader. You are held on the nights when the old version of you is the easiest thing in the room to be.