The Aisle Seat She Guards

Twenty-five past ten and the hall is filling up. The double doors at the back are propped open and every time somebody comes through, the light comes with them and slides all the way down the center aisle before the doors swing shut again.

Loretta got here at five to ten.

She always does. Not because she is early by temperament, and not because she likes the quiet before, though she does. She gets here at five to ten because that is what it takes to get the end seat of row six, on the aisle, and she has had that seat for six years.

The coat goes on the chair beside her. Good coat, folded once, laid across the seat like it landed there. The purse goes on the seat beyond that, upright, handles up, as though she has just set it down for a second while she finds something.

She is not a rude woman. If somebody stood in front of her and asked, she would move both of them in a heartbeat and mean it and shuffle in and be perfectly pleasant about it for an hour. That is exactly the point. Nobody asks. Because it does not look like anything. It looks like a woman with a coat and a purse and a seat.

Five past the hour, and a family comes in late. Four of them, two adults and two children, doing that thing people do in a doorway when they are hunting for a gap: the quick scan, chin up, eyes going along the rows.

They look at row six.

Loretta looks straight ahead at the front, at the hymn board, at nothing in particular, with her whole face arranged as a woman who has not noticed anything. Her hand does not move. The coat does not move.

They go on to row seven and there is not room there either, so the two adults sit apart and one of the children ends up on somebody's lap.

The first song starts and everybody stands up.

And in the little gap after it, in the shuffling and the sitting down, Loretta thinks something she has thought before and never once finished: I did not decide that just now. That got decided a long time ago, and I have been carrying out the decision ever since.

She has never called it what it is. Not once, in six years, in her own head, in plain words.

You have a row six. It is not always a chair. It is a street you do not walk down, an invitation you answer late so it expires, a type of conversation you steer out of before it starts. And you have got extremely good at it, and it does not look like anything to anybody, and you have never said it out loud either.

The Rules Nobody Ever Signed

Let me say the first thing straight, because you have been braced since the parable.

You are not a mean woman. I am not going to spend a paragraph pretending otherwise so that I can do a reveal later. Everybody in that building would put Loretta on the short list of the good ones, and they would be right.

What she has is a rule. And a rule is not a character. A rule is a decision that got made once, probably for a decent reason, and then quietly stopped being a decision and started being an arrangement that runs by itself.

That is why it does not feel like anything when it operates. Nobody experiences their own rules. You only ever notice somebody else's.

You are running an old decision, not a bad heart, and God has never confused the two. No sentence of mine settles that. Scripture does, and the Spirit does: the word says the Lord looks on the heart while everybody else is stuck looking at the outside, and He has been reading yours the whole time.

And here is the part that will do you good. A rule can be named. That is the entire remedy and it is available this morning. A rule keeps its power by not being said out loud, which is why six years can go past inside one, and a rule that gets named in plain words in an ordinary voice starts losing its grip in about four seconds.

You have been given the words for a thing you have carried without words. The Spirit does that work of naming in people, and Psalm 139 already asked God to search and to know and to say what is actually in there.

Not so you can be told off about it. Nobody is telling you off. So that you get your hand back on the wheel.

As One Born Among Us

Now here is where mercy stops being an event and starts being a setting, which is the whole subject.

But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.Leviticus 19:34

Look at the phrase in the middle of that. As one born among you. Not as a guest, not as a project, not as somebody being processed. As family, at the ordinary rate, without a special category.

And look at the reason God attaches, because He does not argue it, He just reminds them: you were strangers in Egypt. That is the whole argument. You know exactly what it is to stand in a doorway scanning the rows.

You were the one brought in from outside, and God has never once forgotten which side of that door you came from. It is written into Leviticus 19:34 in plain words, and the Spirit keeps that memory alive in people so that it turns into room in a row rather than a warm feeling.

Now the limits, and I want to be precise, because this is where articles like this one usually go wrong and hurt somebody.

An open door is not a duty without a bottom to it. It is not a standing obligation to admit whoever presents themselves. You are not required to let a person near you who is not safe, and mercy has never meant that, and anybody who told you it did was wrong. You can keep the aisle seat on the weeks you need the aisle seat. Some weeks you will need it, and there is no shame anywhere in that.

You are permitted to have limits, and God built them into you on purpose. He promised strength for a day at a time, and the Spirit gives it in day sized portions, which tells you plainly what size a person was designed to be.

What we are moving is not your limits. What we are moving is the coat on the chair on a morning when there was room and you were fine.

You are being handed back a decision that had stopped being one. Scripture says to choose whom you will serve, which puts the choosing in your hands, and it is the Holy Spirit who wakes a person up inside an arrangement they had stopped noticing.