The Empty Half of the Pew I Sit In Every Sunday
# The Empty Half of the Pew I Sit In Every Sunday
Five minutes before the first song, my wife hands me her coat, picks up a tote bag full of snack cups and crayons, and disappears down the hallway to the three-year-old room, the same way she has every Sunday for two years now. I slide into our usual spot with both coats across my lap and a diaper bag nobody in our house has needed in over a decade, because old habits in a church building apparently outlive the reasons for them. The sanctuary fills in around me, families and greeters and the man two rows up who always waves, and somewhere in the second verse I notice I am more aware of being alone than I would be sitting in an empty house. A full room can be the loneliest room I know.
I did not expect this particular ache twelve years into sobriety. I had always filed loneliness under my drinking years, the nights I sat at a bar on purpose so I would not have to feel what I was feeling at home. I assumed a good marriage and a full calendar had retired that problem for good. What that half-empty pew keeps teaching me is that loneliness never needed an empty house to begin with. It only needed a quiet minute with nothing to perform and no one talking to me, and it would still find the gap and fill it.
Scripture names this ache earlier than I expected, before sin ever entered the story. "And the LORD God said, 'It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him'" (Genesis 2:18, NKJV). The first thing God ever called not good in a perfect world was a man without company. That verse has started to free me from the shame I used to attach to feeling this way in a pew full of friends. The ache is not evidence that I am ungrateful or spiritually behind. It is evidence that I was built for presence, and that building goes all the way back to Eden.
Elijah's loneliness ran far deeper than mine ever has, and it ran on the same faulty math. Fresh off the mountain where fire fell from heaven in front of the whole nation, he collapsed under a tree and told God, "I alone am left; and they seek to take my life" (1 Kings 19:14, NKJV). He was not technically wrong about how he felt. He was simply wrong about the facts, because God answered him not with an argument but with nearness first, a wind and an earthquake and a fire that He deliberately was not in, and then "a still small voice" (1 Kings 19:12, NKJV). Only after that quiet did God correct the arithmetic: "Yet I have reserved seven thousand in Israel, all whose knees have not bowed to Baal" (1 Kings 19:18, NKJV). Seven thousand companions Elijah could not see from under his own tree.
I cannot see much from my pew either. I could run the same count Elijah ran, tallying the families two rows up against the one man sitting by himself, and land on a conclusion that is accurate and useless at the same time. What has actually started to help is skipping the math altogether and just saying the ache out loud to God the way David did. "Turn Yourself to me, and have mercy on me, For I am desolate and afflicted" (Psalm 25:16, NKJV). I have prayed that exact sentence sitting in that pew, holding a diaper bag, feeling a little ridiculous and a little relieved at the same time.
Here is where my own reasoning runs out completely, because no amount of correct thinking about community statistics was ever going to touch the actual loneliness. Jesus did not leave His disciples a strategy for managing it. He left them a Person. "But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you" (John 14:26, NKJV). And Paul says plainly that this is not theory for anyone in Christ. "But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you" (Romans 8:9, NKJV). Dwells, present tense, inside, which means the aloneness my eyes report from that pew has never once been the whole truth. That is a peace my own perception cannot generate on its own. It is handed to me by Someone already present before I notice I need Him.
Last Sunday I set my wife's coat on the seat beside me the same as always, but instead of just sitting there counting families, I prayed and thanked the Helper who never once has to step out to the nursery. "I am with you always, even to the end of the age" (Matthew 28:20, NKJV). God is alive this morning, and He already knows exactly which full room you feel most alone in. He has a plan for you that was never contingent on who else shows up beside you, and He will never leave you to sit through it by yourself.
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Scriptures used (NKJV): Genesis 2:18; 1 Kings 19:14; 1 Kings 19:12; 1 Kings 19:18; Psalm 25:16; John 14:26; Romans 8:9; Matthew 28:20.
Five minutes before the first song, my wife hands me her coat, picks up a tote bag full of snack cups and crayons, and disappears down the hallway to the three-year-old room, the same way she has every Sunday for two years now. I slide into our usual spot with both coats across my lap and a diaper bag nobody in our house has needed in over a decade, because old habits in a church building apparently outlive the reasons for them. The sanctuary fills in around me, families and greeters and the man two rows up who always waves, and somewhere in the second verse I notice I am more aware of being alone than I would be sitting in an empty house. A full room can be the loneliest room I know.
I did not expect this particular ache twelve years into sobriety. I had always filed loneliness under my drinking years, the nights I sat at a bar on purpose so I would not have to feel what I was feeling at home. I assumed a good marriage and a full calendar had retired that problem for good. What that half-empty pew keeps teaching me is that loneliness never needed an empty house to begin with. It only needed a quiet minute with nothing to perform and no one talking to me, and it would still find the gap and fill it.
Scripture names this ache earlier than I expected, before sin ever entered the story. "And the LORD God said, 'It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him'" (Genesis 2:18, NKJV). The first thing God ever called not good in a perfect world was a man without company. That verse has started to free me from the shame I used to attach to feeling this way in a pew full of friends. The ache is not evidence that I am ungrateful or spiritually behind. It is evidence that I was built for presence, and that building goes all the way back to Eden.
Elijah's loneliness ran far deeper than mine ever has, and it ran on the same faulty math. Fresh off the mountain where fire fell from heaven in front of the whole nation, he collapsed under a tree and told God, "I alone am left; and they seek to take my life" (1 Kings 19:14, NKJV). He was not technically wrong about how he felt. He was simply wrong about the facts, because God answered him not with an argument but with nearness first, a wind and an earthquake and a fire that He deliberately was not in, and then "a still small voice" (1 Kings 19:12, NKJV). Only after that quiet did God correct the arithmetic: "Yet I have reserved seven thousand in Israel, all whose knees have not bowed to Baal" (1 Kings 19:18, NKJV). Seven thousand companions Elijah could not see from under his own tree.
I cannot see much from my pew either. I could run the same count Elijah ran, tallying the families two rows up against the one man sitting by himself, and land on a conclusion that is accurate and useless at the same time. What has actually started to help is skipping the math altogether and just saying the ache out loud to God the way David did. "Turn Yourself to me, and have mercy on me, For I am desolate and afflicted" (Psalm 25:16, NKJV). I have prayed that exact sentence sitting in that pew, holding a diaper bag, feeling a little ridiculous and a little relieved at the same time.
Here is where my own reasoning runs out completely, because no amount of correct thinking about community statistics was ever going to touch the actual loneliness. Jesus did not leave His disciples a strategy for managing it. He left them a Person. "But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you" (John 14:26, NKJV). And Paul says plainly that this is not theory for anyone in Christ. "But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you" (Romans 8:9, NKJV). Dwells, present tense, inside, which means the aloneness my eyes report from that pew has never once been the whole truth. That is a peace my own perception cannot generate on its own. It is handed to me by Someone already present before I notice I need Him.
Last Sunday I set my wife's coat on the seat beside me the same as always, but instead of just sitting there counting families, I prayed and thanked the Helper who never once has to step out to the nursery. "I am with you always, even to the end of the age" (Matthew 28:20, NKJV). God is alive this morning, and He already knows exactly which full room you feel most alone in. He has a plan for you that was never contingent on who else shows up beside you, and He will never leave you to sit through it by yourself.
---
Scriptures used (NKJV): Genesis 2:18; 1 Kings 19:14; 1 Kings 19:12; 1 Kings 19:18; Psalm 25:16; John 14:26; Romans 8:9; Matthew 28:20.
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