The Second Chair I Still Pull Out at the Diner Counter Every Friday Morning
The Second Chair I Still Pull Out at the Diner Counter Every Friday Morning
RedeemedExistence daily devotional, October 20, 2026
Walt and I sat at the same two stools every Friday morning for eleven years, the ones at the far end of the counter where the coffee pot lives, close enough that the waitress never had to walk far to keep refilling us while we talked through whatever the week had tried to wreck. He died in March, quietly, in his sleep, the easiest way a man like that could have gone after the hard way he had lived for so long. I still come on Fridays. I still sit at my stool. And most weeks, without quite deciding to, I pull the second stool out from under the counter anyway, a few inches, enough that it is not pushed all the way in, and I leave it that way for the whole hour before I push it back and walk out alone.
I got sober nine years ago sitting across from Walt in a way I have never managed to get sober sitting across from anyone else since, and I used to think that once a man finds real community in recovery, the loneliness that drove him to drink in the first place is supposed to be handled for good. What this empty stool has taught me since March is that the ache does not check your sobriety date before it shows up. It is not a relapse of character. It is just the plain cost of having loved someone enough that his absence still takes up a seat.
Scripture does not treat this kind of solitary ache as something God is indifferent to or slow to notice. The psalmist writes it almost like a description of what God does as a matter of course, not a special favor reserved for the exceptional. "God sets the solitary in families" (Psalm 68:6, NKJV). I used to read that as a promise mainly about orphans and widows in some ancient sense far from my own kitchen table. Lately I read it as a description of exactly what happened at that counter for eleven years, a man who had burned through every family relationship he owned set down at a Formica counter next to another man in the same condition, and called that a family too, because God is the one who does the setting.
Here is where my own reasoning has never once pulled that stool all the way back in for good. I can tell myself accurately that Walt lived a long full life after he got sober, that he died easy and surrounded by people who loved him, that eleven years of Fridays is more than most men ever get. Every sentence is true, and none of it has stopped my hand from reaching for that second stool out of habit before my mind catches up to why. Loneliness was never actually a facts problem waiting on a better perspective. It is a presence problem, and the only true answer to an empty chair is not a truer thought but an actual Someone. God does not leave that question hanging. "Let your conduct be without covetousness; be content with such things as you have. For He Himself has said, 'I will never leave you nor forsake you'" (Hebrews 13:5, NKJV). He Himself said it, not a sentiment attached after the fact to comfort the grieving, but a promise spoken plainly in His own voice.
This is exactly what abiding in the Spirit offers that eleven years of friendship, as real as it was, was never actually built to finish on its own. Jesus told His own disciples the night before He left them that He was not leaving them with only a memory to keep warm. "And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever, the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you" (John 14:16-17, NKJV). Another Helper, not a lesser one, and not one who visits on Fridays and then goes home. Paul tells the Romans where that Helper actually lives once He comes. "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 rather than across a counter, closer than a second stool could ever reach even on its best Friday.
I do not expect the empty stool to stop meaning something, and I have stopped asking it to. What I have started doing instead, somewhere around the third cup of coffee, is letting the quiet at that end of the counter be a kind of prayer rather than only a kind of grief. God told His people through Isaiah exactly what to do with the fear that loneliness likes to dress itself up as. "Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, yes, I will help you, I will uphold you with My righteous right hand" (Isaiah 41:10, NKJV). And Jesus left His own followers with a promise that was never meant to expire with the first century. "Teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age" (Matthew 28:20, NKJV).
I pushed the second stool back in a little slower this morning than I usually do. God is alive today, and He already knows exactly whose empty chair you keep pulling out from under your own counter, whose name still comes before your coffee does. He has a plan for you that was never going to be undone by one empty seat, however much that seat deserves its grief. He will never leave you, not at that counter, not anywhere else you have ever sat alone.
Scriptures used (NKJV): Psalm 68:6; Hebrews 13:5; John 14:16-17; Romans 8:9; Isaiah 41:10; Matthew 28:20.
RedeemedExistence daily devotional, October 20, 2026
Walt and I sat at the same two stools every Friday morning for eleven years, the ones at the far end of the counter where the coffee pot lives, close enough that the waitress never had to walk far to keep refilling us while we talked through whatever the week had tried to wreck. He died in March, quietly, in his sleep, the easiest way a man like that could have gone after the hard way he had lived for so long. I still come on Fridays. I still sit at my stool. And most weeks, without quite deciding to, I pull the second stool out from under the counter anyway, a few inches, enough that it is not pushed all the way in, and I leave it that way for the whole hour before I push it back and walk out alone.
I got sober nine years ago sitting across from Walt in a way I have never managed to get sober sitting across from anyone else since, and I used to think that once a man finds real community in recovery, the loneliness that drove him to drink in the first place is supposed to be handled for good. What this empty stool has taught me since March is that the ache does not check your sobriety date before it shows up. It is not a relapse of character. It is just the plain cost of having loved someone enough that his absence still takes up a seat.
Scripture does not treat this kind of solitary ache as something God is indifferent to or slow to notice. The psalmist writes it almost like a description of what God does as a matter of course, not a special favor reserved for the exceptional. "God sets the solitary in families" (Psalm 68:6, NKJV). I used to read that as a promise mainly about orphans and widows in some ancient sense far from my own kitchen table. Lately I read it as a description of exactly what happened at that counter for eleven years, a man who had burned through every family relationship he owned set down at a Formica counter next to another man in the same condition, and called that a family too, because God is the one who does the setting.
Here is where my own reasoning has never once pulled that stool all the way back in for good. I can tell myself accurately that Walt lived a long full life after he got sober, that he died easy and surrounded by people who loved him, that eleven years of Fridays is more than most men ever get. Every sentence is true, and none of it has stopped my hand from reaching for that second stool out of habit before my mind catches up to why. Loneliness was never actually a facts problem waiting on a better perspective. It is a presence problem, and the only true answer to an empty chair is not a truer thought but an actual Someone. God does not leave that question hanging. "Let your conduct be without covetousness; be content with such things as you have. For He Himself has said, 'I will never leave you nor forsake you'" (Hebrews 13:5, NKJV). He Himself said it, not a sentiment attached after the fact to comfort the grieving, but a promise spoken plainly in His own voice.
This is exactly what abiding in the Spirit offers that eleven years of friendship, as real as it was, was never actually built to finish on its own. Jesus told His own disciples the night before He left them that He was not leaving them with only a memory to keep warm. "And I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever, the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him; but you know Him, for He dwells with you and will be in you" (John 14:16-17, NKJV). Another Helper, not a lesser one, and not one who visits on Fridays and then goes home. Paul tells the Romans where that Helper actually lives once He comes. "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 rather than across a counter, closer than a second stool could ever reach even on its best Friday.
I do not expect the empty stool to stop meaning something, and I have stopped asking it to. What I have started doing instead, somewhere around the third cup of coffee, is letting the quiet at that end of the counter be a kind of prayer rather than only a kind of grief. God told His people through Isaiah exactly what to do with the fear that loneliness likes to dress itself up as. "Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, yes, I will help you, I will uphold you with My righteous right hand" (Isaiah 41:10, NKJV). And Jesus left His own followers with a promise that was never meant to expire with the first century. "Teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age" (Matthew 28:20, NKJV).
I pushed the second stool back in a little slower this morning than I usually do. God is alive today, and He already knows exactly whose empty chair you keep pulling out from under your own counter, whose name still comes before your coffee does. He has a plan for you that was never going to be undone by one empty seat, however much that seat deserves its grief. He will never leave you, not at that counter, not anywhere else you have ever sat alone.
Scriptures used (NKJV): Psalm 68:6; Hebrews 13:5; John 14:16-17; Romans 8:9; Isaiah 41:10; Matthew 28:20.
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