Someone Loved First and It Was Not You

Six o'clock, the same chair, the one with the split in the vinyl he has been meaning to tape for four years.

He puts the coffee down on the left of the mat, because it has always gone on the left. He opens the notebook. He has a list in it, and the list has his mother on it, and his daughter's job, and the man at work whose marriage is coming apart, and a boy from the parish who is in trouble again.

And he prays. Nine years he has done this, near enough every day, and there was a stretch in the middle of it he would not trade for anything.

What has changed is that lately, as he sits down, something in him braces.

Because he has noticed the shape of it. He speaks. He waits. He speaks again. He reads a psalm out loud sometimes to break the feel of it. And it has begun to seem to him, in a way he would not say out loud in the sacristy or anywhere else, that he is the only one at the table. That he opens it every morning, and he closes it every morning, and in between he is a man talking pleasantly to a room.

He has not stopped. That is the thing you should know about him. He has never once skipped a morning over it. He just sits down now the way you dial a number you are fairly sure is disconnected.

Who actually speaks first

John writes one of the shortest sentences in the letters, and the whole order of your life with God is inside it.

We love him, because he first loved us.1 John 4:19

Look at the word first. It is doing all the work.

He is not saying we love God and God responds. He is not saying our affection starts a fire and God's affection is the answering warmth. He is saying the sequence runs the other way and always has, and that every scrap of love you have ever felt toward God was already a reply to something.

Which means the conversation at that table was never opened by you. Not once. Not on the best morning you ever had in that chair.

You have been answering somebody for nine years and calling it starting. That is not a comforting spin I am putting on your situation; it is the plain order the written word puts it in, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lifts a sentence out of a first-century letter and stands it up beside a kitchen chair with a split in the vinyl.

What the bracing is actually about

Now let me get at what happens in you as you sit down, because I think you have diagnosed it wrong.

You have decided the bracing means the line is dead. But look again. A man does not brace himself to speak into a room he believes is empty. Nobody feels dread about talking to an empty kitchen. You dread it because some part of you still expects Someone to be there and is frightened of the silence that follows.

That is not the posture of a man who has lost his faith. That is the posture of a man who is still, every morning at six, extending himself toward a Person.

You are wanting Him, and the wanting is not something you generated on your own. Philippians 2:13 says He is the one who works both the willing and the doing in a person, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been putting that six o'clock impulse in a man for nine years running.

And I want to take one thing off you completely, because I think you have been quietly holding it. You have not been carrying this conversation. It was never on your shoulders to keep it alive by being interesting enough, or warm enough, or consistent enough. The list in the notebook is not the price of admission.

Nine years of showing up to a chair you increasingly dread is not the behavior of a lukewarm man. You are being read correctly by God even while you are misreading yourself, and He has never confused a dry morning with a departure. Scripture is clear that He knows the frame of the person He made and does not forget what we are, and His Spirit is the one who keeps that from being a nice idea and makes it a thing said about you.