The Chair Already Has Somebody In It

Fadi has done everything and the shop is still not his to keep.

Three months. The lease renewal is being decided by a company whose office is in a city he has never been to, by people whose names appear at the bottom of letters and nowhere else, and every single thing a man can do about it, Fadi has done.

He wrote the letter. Then he had a solicitor write a better one. He got ninety-one customers to sign a page, which took him two weeks and which he was quietly proud of and which produced an acknowledgement of receipt.

He rang on a Tuesday and was told the file was with someone else. He rang on the Thursday and was told the same thing by a different person in a way that suggested she had also never seen it.

He has started waking at four.

That is the part his wife knows about and nobody else does. Four, most mornings, with the whole thing going round: the wording of the letter, whether he should have used the solicitor, whether the ninety-one signatures made him look desperate rather than established.

His uncle Salim came in on a Saturday and sat on the crate by the door where he has sat since 1998.

He watched Fadi serve four people and re-stack a shelf that did not need re-stacking and check his phone eleven times.

Then he said, "Sit down, habibi."

Fadi said he was fine.

"Sit down."

So he sat on the other crate, and Salim did not say anything for a while, and then he said this:

"I lost a shop. Do you know that? Thirty-one years ago, two streets from here, and I did what you are doing now for two years before it closed."

Fadi said he did not know that.

"No. Nobody talks about it." He turned his cup round. "And I will tell you what those two years cost me. Not the shop. I lost the shop anyway, and it was the same shop whether I slept or not."

He put the cup down.

"What it cost me was every evening. Every single one. My daughter was seven and I have almost nothing from that year, because I was in a chair that was not mine, trying to do a job that is taken."

Now let me ask you what you have been deciding at four in the morning.

Because there is something. A case, a decision, a diagnosis, a person's mind, an outcome that is being worked out somewhere by somebody you will never meet, and you have been going over your own conduct in it night after night as though the review would change the ruling.

The job is taken

There is a sentence in Daniel spoken by a man who had been the most powerful person alive and had recently spent a long season out of his mind, and it is the plainest statement of God's government in the Bible.

He does according to His will in the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of earth; and no one can ward off His hand or say to Him, "What have You done?"Daniel 4:35

Notice who is saying it. Not a prophet writing about a king. The king himself, restored, writing it down in a public decree, which means these are the words of somebody who genuinely believed he was the government and found out otherwise.

He does according to His will. Present tense. Continuous. Not stepping in occasionally.

No one can ward off His hand. And here is the thing everybody reads as a threat and which is, to a man on a crate at four in the morning, the most restful sentence available: if nobody can ward off His hand, then neither can the company in the city you have never been to.

So hear this said over you, on the crate by the door with your phone face down. You are not the government of your own life, and the letter you did not word perfectly did not put this outcome beyond His reach. That is written in the words of a king who tried the other way, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence about a throne and turns it into something a tired man can actually put his shoulders down into.

Now let me guard this immediately, because sovereignty is the doctrine most often used to say something cruel.

Nothing here tells you to stop acting.

Write the second letter. Ring on the Thursday. Get the signatures. Scripture is full of people who did everything within reach and prayed while they did it, and there is no verse anywhere that asks a person to go slack because God is on the throne. Fadi should keep going, and Salim's advice was not to give up, it was to go home in the evenings.

And nothing here says God arranged this to teach you anything. That sentence gets handed to people in your position constantly and it is not in Daniel 4 and it is not here.

What is here is smaller and it is the actual comfort the doctrine was built to give.

You are not required to hold the outcome.

That is what the four in the morning is. It is not planning, because you have already made every plan. It is a man holding an outcome up with his own arms, hour after hour, in the dark, because at some point he came to believe that if he stopped concentrating it would fall.

It will not fall. Not because it will go your way, which nobody in this article can promise you, but because it is being held by somebody whose grip does not depend on your attention.

The written word says He upholds all things by the word of His power, and it is the Spirit of God who makes a person able to sleep on a thing they cannot control, which is not a technique and never was.

Let me say one more thing, and it is the thing Salim was actually saying.

The chair is not empty.

That is why the effort feels so strange. A man trying to govern an outcome is not doing an impossible job badly, he is doing an occupied job unnecessarily, and the exhaustion is the exhaustion of standing next to a throne insisting the throne needs help.

There was a movement five hundred years ago built by people with no power whatsoever: no crown, no army, no protection, and frequently no legal right to meet. What they held onto was not that things would go well for them. Several of them it went extremely badly for. What they held was that God governs whether or not the authorities agree, and that turned out to be the one thing that could not be taken off them.

That is not a doctrine for winners. It was worked out by people who were losing.