I Still Set The Chair Out

Wednesday morning, and the salon has three chairs. She rents the third one, at the back, by the window that does not open.

She is in at nine because she has been in at nine for eleven years. The gowns are folded. The clips are laid along the shelf in the order she likes them, big to small, the way her mother taught her before her mother's hands went.

The book is open beside the clips. Half past ten, a color. That is the whole of Wednesday, written in one line.

She used to keep the pencil handy because things had to be moved about. It has not been needed in a long while.

Kelly at chair one is busy. Kelly has been busy all week, and it is nobody's doing and it is certainly not Kelly's fault, and she is glad for her, mostly, and there is a thing underneath the gladness that she does not look at straight on.

At twenty past ten she runs the water until it is warm, so it will be warm when the lady arrives. Nobody asked her to. The lady likes it warm and still remembers being asked, years ago, whether the temperature was all right.

Then she stands by the window that does not open and thinks about the rent on the chair, which falls due whether the chair is full or empty, and thinks: I have prayed about this for four years and I have a page with one line on it.

That is where you are as well, or you would not have opened this. So let us be careful with the word standing before we go one step further.

The word underneath the word standing

The name of this shelf of the site is faith still standing, and I want to take you to the place in the Scriptures where standing is not a figure of speech at all.

In the Hebrew of the Old Testament the word we translate as faith is emunah. It does not belong to a family of words about producing, generating or obtaining. It comes from a root meaning firm, held, steady, reliable. It is the same root that gives a whole room the word it says at the end of a prayer: amen. Let it stand.

And there is exactly one place where that word is used of a pair of hands.

But Moses' hands were heavy; and they took a stone, and put it under him, and he sat thereon; and Aaron and Hur stayed up his hands, the one on the one side, and the other on the other side; and his hands were steady until the going down of the sun.Exodus 17:12

The word translated steady there is emunah. Faith. The first time the word appears in that form in the Bible, it is describing arms that were still up at the end of a very long day, and it is worth noticing what the verse gives the credit to. Not the strength in the arms. A stone underneath, and two men, one on each side.

So hear this at that chair, before we go anywhere else. Your faith is not a piece of equipment that has stopped working. You are steady, and steady is the whole of what the word has ever meant. I am not laying my own opinion over you: Exodus 17:12 puts that word on a pair of held-up hands and calls it enough, and the Holy Spirit is the one who kept that verse in the written record so that no believer in any century would have to weigh their faith by what it produced.

What the name over this door does not mean

Now the honest part, and it comes early because it has been withheld from you long enough.

Faith over poverty does not mean that faith removes poverty. There is no arrangement anywhere in Scripture where trusting God harder turns into an amount, and if anybody ever left you with that impression, then four years of quietly auditing yourself were spent settling a debt you never owed.

Let me name the weight, because it has been carried without a name. It is not the empty page. It is the second thing that grows underneath the empty page: the suspicion that a proper believer would not still be renting a chair nobody sits in. That there is a key somewhere, and it was handed to chair one, and it was not handed to you.

That suspicion has no right to stay in your mind and I am not going to spend a sentence being gentle with it. You are not under review. Romans 8:1 says there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, which is a legal statement and not a piece of encouragement, and the Holy Spirit is the one who bears witness to it inside you on the mornings you cannot feel a thing.

What your faith has actually been doing

Not filling the page. Let that be said plainly, with no religious word laid over the top of it, and then let us look at what it has been doing, because it is not nothing and it has been undervalued at the back of that salon for years.

It ran the water warm at twenty past ten for a woman who is one appointment. It laid the clips out big to small. It prayed on the way in. It has not concluded that God is a fiction, which is honestly the simpler position from where you are standing.

Look at what that is. You have a faith that has kept its grip through a stretch that has loosened the grip of people with far easier lives, and the written word does not call that small, it calls it endurance and says that the one who endures is blessed (James 1:12). The same Spirit who has been holding you up in it is not standing behind you with a mark sheet.

Nobody holds their own hands up

Go back to the hill, because there is something there you need more than the word study.

Moses did not hold his own arms up. He could not. The text says his hands were heavy, which is the plainest sentence in the chapter, and the remedy was not more resolve. It was a stone underneath and a man on either side.

We have made faith a solo performance, measured by how long a person can keep their own arms in the air, and then we hand somebody a shortfall and tell them to hold harder. The verse says nothing of the kind. The steadiness in Exodus 17:12 has other hands in it.

So this is yours today, and it is not a turn of phrase. You are held. Hebrews 13:5 has God saying He will never leave you nor forsake you, and Jesus called the Holy Spirit the Helper who would be with you always and in you (John 14:16 and 17), so the arms that have been up over a rented chair for four years have not been up on your own strength for a single one of those days.