The view from the unused chair

Habits can be so limiting.  I am sitting in my studio in our mid-sized, small town house realizing, now that the kids are grown and flown, there are entire rooms that I hardly enter.  And in those rooms are chairs which I never use. 

Suddenly, I am driven by the urge to spend some time in each of them and allow my short, sitting sojourns to give me a new perspective on each room and on our lives.  And let the Spirit use that to guide me in prayer.

Want to come along?  Believe me, there are plenty of extra chairs.

I start in the upstairs guest bedroom.  This may be the first time I have ever sat in this old rocker, reclaimed and refinished by Alison’s grandparents.  It is a firm chair.  Solid.  After I settle in, dust motes float up in the morning sun like reversed snowflakes.

Directly across from me is an early painting by my middle son.  I don’t often see this parrot while passing by in the hall.  I begin to pray for him and his avocational dedication to his art.  It has grown in depth since he moved to urban Pittsburgh and is beginning to be recognized for its originality.  I pray that God will guide and inspire him.

Downstairs, in the den we’ve converted to a guest room, is another rocker.  On it is a pillow made from my late father-in-law’s shirt.  As I sit and lean against it, I pray that I’ll be the kind of grandfather he was to my kids.

The bed dominates the room from this view.  It’s quite dramatic in the light.  Homey.  I ask God to bring people to stay here, using this room to bless others, making it a place of ministry and caring.  Hospitality has always been important to us.

On the wall nearby is a gallery of my illustration, only recently hung.  It feels incomplete.  So does my career: there’s something yet ahead, some new Kingdom use for the skills I’ve been given.  I pray that I’ll find it.

In the foyer is the hardest chair in the house.  We call it “The Naughty Chair” – so named for the behavior of those who were sentenced to a time-out on it, not for any infractions the chair itself may have done.  Though, looking at this photo, it does vaguely resemble the back of a tattooed, bald biker head.

Appropriately, the Spirit give me my hardest insight here.  Located in the foyer of the former front door – which we never use now – the chair’s perspective causes me to wonder what I have closed off that should be re-opened.  A few pointed answers come to mind.  I confess them to God.

In Philippians 2, Paul has something to say about perspectives:

Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.  Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. (vs. 3-4)

Self-centeredness, he points out, is the enemy of community, of agape love.  And self-centeredness grows through a heads-down pursuit of one’s own agenda with the blinders of conceit – believing one’s perspective to be infallible, justifiable.

The view from one’s favorite seat grows to become the right one.

Paul then points Jesus as an example of selflessness.  And as I read the gospels, I’m amazed at how deftly Jesus shifts to understand the widely disparate outlooks of the people he meets.  In John 3 he sharply diagnoses what a religious powerbroker needs to hear to be right with God.  Then in John 4 he does the same to a woman at the bottom of the social order.  (Where, I might add, he sits down.)

This is another way in which I want to be like him.  (There are so many!)  And I realize that perception requires perspectives.

Leaving aside the well-worn shoes aphorism, I need to sit for a spell in another man’s chair.

Lord, forgive us for how we allow our habits to lull us into a single, self-justifying view on others.  We want to be like Jesus, the great demonstrator of selflessness, humbling himself to die for us like a common criminal.  Get us up and out of our comfortable chairs!

Reader – here’s my challenge to you: sit in an unused chair in your house this week. ( I know you have one)!  And tell me what it leads you to pray for.