Four Dents in the Carpet

Wendell has a kitchen stool in his front room.

Not a joke stool. A real one, wooden, with a rung worn shiny where his boot goes, and it sits square in front of the television at a height that means his knees are up higher than they ought to be for a man of sixty-eight with the hip he has got.

I noticed the carpet before I noticed the stool.

Four dents. Deep ones, the kind that only come from a heavy thing standing in one place for about fifteen years, and they were still there, arranged in a rectangle about the size of a recliner, with the pile around them a slightly different color from the sun.

I sat on his sofa and drank his coffee and looked at those four dents for the better part of an hour before I asked.

He said the chair was out in the shed.

I said, is it broke.

He said no.

And then he sat there on that stool with his knees up and did not say anything for a good while, and I did not fill it, because I have learned that much at least.

Then he said, "It was after the business with Curtis."

I knew about Curtis. Most of the county knew about Curtis. And I knew that Curtis had been round to this house on a Sunday afternoon four years ago and the two of them had sorted it out at that very table, and that they have hunted together twice since.

"Curtis forgave you," I said.

"Curtis did."

"And God?"

He turned his cup around. "I reckon."

Then he said, "I just did not think I ought to be sat comfortable. Not after that. So I put it out."

Four years. On a kitchen stool. In his own front room, with the good chair standing out in a cold shed under a tarpaulin, and nobody on this earth knowing about it except him and now me.

Now let me ask you what yours is.

Because I have not met many people who do not have one. It is rarely a chair. It is a thing you stopped doing that you loved and never took back up. It is a holiday you will not take. It is the fact that you have not bought yourself anything that was not necessary since a particular year. It is the meal you skip, the friendship you let go quiet, the thing you are good at that you gave up and have called "not having time for it" ever since.

Nobody asked you for it. That is the part. There was no sentence handed down, no requirement, no person on this earth who knows. You added it yourself, quietly, because it did not seem right to be sitting comfortable.

Severe with yourself, and no good to anybody

Paul writes about this exact instinct, and he does not sneer at it. He does something harder than sneering. He grants that it looks good and then tells you what it cannot do.

These are matters which have, to be sure, the appearance of wisdom in self-made religion and self-abasement and severe treatment of the body, but are of no value against fleshly indulgence.Colossians 2:23

Read the first half honestly, because Paul is being fair and we should be too.

The appearance of wisdom. It does look wise. A man on a stool in his own front room looks like a serious man. Nobody would ever accuse him of taking grace lightly, which is exactly the accusation you have been quietly defending yourself against for years.

Self-made religion. And there it is, in three words. Not God-made. Yours. A rule you wrote, a sentence you passed, an order you issued to yourself in a moment when you could not bear how free you had been let off.

Of no value. Not a little value. None. It does not do the thing you set it up to do.

So hear this over you, plainly, because you have been sitting on that stool a long time. You are already forgiven and you are already free, and the private sentence you have been serving has never added one ounce to that, because there was nothing to add to. It is written down, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a written freedom and gets a person up off a hard seat, and He is not in a hurry with you about it.

Now let me be careful here, because a message like this gets misheard by good people.

I am not preaching against going without. Fasting is real, it is biblical, it is good, and I have done it and will again. Simplicity is a fine way to live and half the trouble in this country comes from not having any.

The difference is who set it and what it is for.

A fast that God calls you to is a doorway. You go without in order to get at something, and there is a warmth in it and a purpose, and it has an end. What Wendell had was a sentence. He was not going without in order to get at anything. He was going without because he had privately decided that a man like him ought not to be sat comfortable, and a sentence has no doorway in it. It just runs.

And here is the sad part, and Wendell knew it before I said a word. Four years on a stool did not make him feel more forgiven. It made him feel more like a man serving something. Scripture is right on the money: of no value against fleshly indulgence. It did not even improve him. It just hurt his hip.

You are not more forgiven on the stool. You were completely forgiven on the recliner.

There was a man five hundred years ago who slept in the cold without a blanket on purpose, and fasted until his stomach was ruined for life, and did it all in a sincere attempt to be right with God. Late on, he found out that righteousness was a gift handed over rather than a thing bought with severity, and he said afterward that all that self-treatment had done was make him a man who could not sleep and still could not rest. He did not turn soft. He worked harder than any three men. But he brought the chair back in.