The Chair Beside the Bed

The chair beside a hospital bed is always the wrong height and always vinyl and always slightly too far from the bed, so the first thing anybody does when they sit in one is drag it six inches across the floor, and everybody in the bay hears it, and nobody minds.

She has done that. She is settled now. Bag on the floor, coat over the back, curtain half round the way they leave it when a patient is doing well and just tired.

She is very good at this. That is the thing about her. Four hours on a hard chair and she never once looks at her phone, and she does not fill the silences, and she knows exactly when to ask a question and when to just be a person in a chair. The woman in the bed has a large family and a great many friends, and when the ward rang, they rang her.

They always ring her. Two funerals, one long illness, a bad year somebody had with a son. Whoever needs somebody in the chair, it is her in the chair.

And what she has never told a living soul, and has believed since she was fifteen, is that she herself came out wrong. Not did wrong. Came out wrong, at the factory, on the inside, and that everything good she does is a very well made cover over the top of that.

Something was done to her, a long time ago, by another person. And her conclusion about it has never once been examined out loud, because she has never once said it out loud.

Sit down here beside me. I am not going to ask you what it was, not now, not later, not at the end. I am not going to ask you to tell one human being anything, ever. Nothing here wants the thing itself.

Nothing that happened later could reach back that far

Here is the belief, and I am going to say it plainly because it deserves the respect of being named accurately.

You do not think you did something wrong. You think you are something wrong, and you think the thing that happened is the proof of it, and that everything since has been management. That is the whole architecture of it, and it is a serious belief, honestly held, and it needs a serious answer.

Here is the answer.

Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee.Jeremiah 1:5

Look at the timestamps in that verse, because they are the entire argument.

Before I formed thee. The knowing came first. Not after He saw how it turned out, not after He weighed the years. Before the forming.

Before thou camest forth. The setting apart came before the birth. Sanctified means set apart for Him, marked as His, dedicated. It happened before you drew a breath in this world, which means it happened before any human being on this earth ever laid a hand or a word on you.

So put the two things beside each other. The knowing and the setting apart are earlier than the event. Not stronger than it, not a repair after it. Earlier. Out of its reach entirely.

You are known and set apart by God from before you were formed, and you were sanctified before anything at all had happened to you. That is not my reading of it. The written word puts both acts in front of the womb on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and gets it under a belief that has been standing unchallenged since a woman was fifteen.

An event can wound you and it cannot manufacture you

I want to make one distinction and then I want to let it sit.

What happened to you did real damage. I am not going to minimize that to win the point, and any message that has to shrink your injury in order to comfort you is not worth reading. It was real, it cost, and some of what it cost has not been paid back yet.

But damage and manufacture are two different things. A thing can be hurt without being made. A window broken by a stone was not made by the stone, and no glazier in the world would say otherwise.

Whoever did what was done had the power to hurt you. Nobody except God has ever had the power to make you, and He did it before the hour in question, and He does not do it twice.

You are made by God and merely wounded by a person, and you were never remanufactured by anything that was done. Scripture says we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus, and it is His Spirit, not the strength of an argument, who carries that down past a conclusion a woman has kept for decades.