The Chair He Carries Up The Stairs

Two flights. Twenty two steps and then a turn and then twenty two more.

The lift in that block has been broken for the whole of this story and there is a long history of letters about it that has never once produced a lift.

He goes on Tuesdays and Fridays. Down, out, the car, the appointment or the market or the sister who lives across town, and then back, and then the stairs again. The chair folds but it is not light, and by the top he is not talking.

Six years.

The old man makes a joke about it every single time, the same joke, and he laughs every single time, and neither of them has ever considered doing otherwise.

Here is the thought that came at him last month, sitting in the car outside afterwards.

I did not choose this.

Not resentfully. He would carry that man up those stairs on a broken leg. It is more that he found himself thinking about his life the way you sometimes do at forty seven, and looking for the parts he had picked, and finding instead a great many parts that had simply arrived, and this one at the top of the list.

Two flights, twice a week, for six years, because the lift is broken and because he was the one on the landing when it started.

And underneath it, quietly, the question. Is a life made of things you did not choose actually a life you can call yours.

He has told nobody, because it sounds like complaining and he is not complaining.

If you have sat in a car and thought that, come up and sit on this landing. Nobody is going to ask you to carry anything else.

Whatever you do, and He meant whatever

There is a line Paul writes to a church that contained a great many people who had not chosen their circumstances at all, and the first word of it does the work.

Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men.Colossians 3:23

Whatever. Not whichever parts you selected. Not the calling you discerned. Whatever you happen to be doing, including the thing that arrived on you because you were standing on the landing.

And look at where he redirects it. As for the Lord and not for men. He does not say do it cheerfully or do it without complaining. He relocates the recipient. The stairs are still the stairs, the chair is still heavy, and the person it is actually being done for turns out not to be the man in the chair.

You have been working for the Lord on those stairs, and you have been doing it for six years. Colossians 3:23 puts the whatever in front of Him rather than in front of men, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been on that landing with you every Tuesday, which means the thing you did not choose has been going somewhere the whole time.

Chosen is not the measure

Now let me go at the question underneath, because it is a real question and it deserves better than encouragement.

You asked whether a life made of things you did not choose is a life you can call yours.

Look at how Scripture treats that. Almost nobody in it chose their part. A shepherd boy is fetched in from a field. A young woman is told what is going to happen to her. A fisherman is standing in a boat mending nets when the whole of the rest of his life arrives on the shore. Paul is on a road going somewhere else entirely.

The people who chose their own assignments in Scripture are, on the whole, the ones it goes badly for.

You are not living a lesser life because it arrived rather than being selected, and none of it has been overlooked. Hebrews 6:10 says God is not unjust so as to overlook your work and the love you have shown in serving, and it is His Spirit who has been present on every one of those twenty two steps, so the question you asked in the car has an answer and the answer is not the one you were bracing for.

Now hear the part this site will not break. Nobody is telling you to do more. There is no target, no suggestion that six years should have been ten, and nothing here is asking you to add a Wednesday.

You have already been faithful, in the present tense, in a stretch of years you were half writing off. Luke 16:10 says the one faithful in very little is faithful also in much, and it is the Holy Spirit who has made a repeated act into the actual substance of two men's lives.

And under all of it: God is the one keeping you while you keep the stairs. You have not been holding that man up on your own, and you were never the only reason he gets out of the building.