Christmas Eve, and the Fourth Chair

The decision was made in October, at somebody's kitchen table, and she was not in the room for it.

Her sister told her afterward, kindly, over the phone, in the voice people use when they have thought about how to say a thing. We are doing everything the same. The same house, the same time, the same soup on the twenty fourth, the same walk to the late service, the same stockings on the same nails. Nothing is changing. He would have wanted that.

And she said, yes, of course, that sounds right.

She put the phone down on the counter and she stood at the window with her coat still on for a long time.

Her son died in April. He was twenty six and he had been coming to that house on the twenty fourth of December every year of his life, and the last three of those years he had brought a girl with him, and the girl is not coming this year, and nobody has mentioned that either.

There are four chairs at that table. There have been four chairs at that table since 1998.

She keeps thinking about the soup. It is a particular soup. It takes the whole afternoon and it fills the whole house and the smell of it starts somewhere around three o'clock, and every one of the last twenty six years her son has come through the back door at some point in the afternoon and said something about it, the same joke, the same words, every single year.

At three o'clock on the twenty fourth of December that smell is going to start, and the back door is not going to open.

And the whole family has agreed, out of love, at a table she was not sitting at, that this is the year everything stays the same.

She cannot say a word against it. They are grieving too. Her sister has been the one holding all of it together since April and has not had one hour of her own. And they are not wrong that he loved it. He did love it.

She just does not know how she is going to get from three o'clock to midnight.

If anybody has stood at a window with a coat still on like that, stay here. There is a line at the end of the hundred and twenty first psalm that is going to change what that evening is being asked to be.

The psalm does not promise the evening. It promises the door.

Read the last verse of that psalm slowly, because almost everybody remembers the middle and forgets how it ends.

The LORD shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.Psalm 121:8

Going out. Coming in. That is the whole of it.

It is not a promise that the evening will be good. It is not a promise that the soup will not undo her at three o'clock or that the walk to the late service will be bearable or that anybody will say the right thing. Look at the verse. There is nothing in it about how the night goes.

There is a promise about the door. There is a promise about the going out and there is a promise about the coming back, and the God who makes it says He does it from this time forth, which means starting now, in October, at a window, with a coat still on.

You are preserved in the going out on the twenty fourth and preserved in the coming home again, and you were preserved in every going out since April that nobody watched. Psalm 121:8 is the written word putting the promise on the door rather than on the evening, and the Spirit who breathed that line has been standing in a kitchen with a woman since a phone call in October.

Now the other half, which changes the arithmetic completely. The one who keeps that door is described four verses earlier as the one who neither slumbers nor sleeps.

She is going to be tired on the twenty fourth. She is going to be more tired than she has been in years, because bracing is tiring in a way that work is not. And the keeper of that door does not get tired, has never been tired, and is not going to be tired at eleven at night when everybody walks back from the late service in the cold.

You have a keeper on Christmas Eve who does not need any strength from you to do His keeping, and you were kept on every April night when you had none left at all. Psalm 121:4 says He that keepeth thee will not slumber, and the same Holy Spirit is awake in a farmhouse at midnight when the house has finally gone quiet.

The family is not testing you and the soup is not a trap

Now let me protect that sister, because there is Christmas coming and I do not want anything sitting between the two of you.

She made that decision at a kitchen table in October out of love and out of fear, and mostly out of fear, because she is standing in front of a loss she cannot fix and she reached for the only solid object in the room, which was the way it has always been done.

Sameness is a handrail. People grip handrails when the floor moves. That is not thoughtlessness and it is not a failure to consider what three o'clock will do, it is a woman holding a family together with the only thing she has got in her hands.

And I want to say something else about it, because it is true and it will help. Keeping the soup is not a way of pretending nothing happened. Sometimes a family keeps everything the same for exactly the opposite reason. Sometimes the sameness is the only place they know how to put him. That house on the twenty fourth is full of him, and everybody in it knows it, and none of them can say so.

So the arrangement is not a test. Nobody at that table is marking a card. And if the soup lands like a hand on a burn at three o'clock, that is not a woman failing an evening. That is a mother in a kitchen in the first December.

You are not being examined on Christmas Eve, and you were never entered for anything on that date. Nothing anywhere in Scripture makes a mourner's love for her son a function of how she handles an evening, and the Spirit of God is not standing by the stove at three o'clock with a clipboard.

Nobody has the right to hand you a script for that night

Now the part where I have to be careful, because the help would be the harm.

I am not going to tell anybody how to spend Christmas Eve.

I could. Set a place for him. Do not set a place for him. Say his name at the table. Do not say his name at the table. Light a candle. Skip the late service. Leave early. Stay to the end. Every one of those has been recommended somewhere by somebody kind who was quite sure it was the thing.

And every one of them, handed over as an instruction, quietly turns the twenty fourth into a task with a grade on the far side.

There is no grade. There is no correct way to sit in a room with four chairs and one of them empty. There is no arrangement of a December evening that either honors a son properly or fails to.

If the soup gets made and she cries into it, that stands. If she goes for a walk at three o'clock and comes back at five and nobody says anything, that stands. If she sits at that table for the whole evening and gets through it by counting the panes in the window, that stands. If she leaves before the late service, alone, in the car, that stands too, and it is not a thing she owes anybody an account of afterward.

You are free on that evening in a way nobody in the family will think to tell you that you are. Romans 14:5 says let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind about the day he keeps, and the Holy Spirit does not overrule a grieving woman's own conscience about her own son's Christmas.