I Sit on the Edge of the Chair

The words that open every page on this site go here too. This is not medicine. I have no clinical training, nothing on this page is treatment, and nothing I write ever stands in for a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist. If the reason you are worn out has not been looked at by anybody qualified, ring them today, before anything else on this page.

Now. I have been watching how you sit.

You do sit down. I want to be fair about that. You sit down several times a day and somebody watching from across a room would say you were having a rest.

But you sit on the front six inches of the chair. Your feet are under you. Your back is not touching anything. You are, at every moment, about four seconds from being upright again, and you have been sitting like that for so long that it does not register as a posture any more.

And the odd thing is that it does not rest anybody. A person half out of a chair is spending energy, quietly, the whole time. So the sitting down happens and the resting does not, and at the end of the day there is no accounting for where it all went.

Somebody was told to sit still with no reason given

There is a line at the end of a chapter in Ruth that I have loved for a long time, because of what it does not contain.

Then said she, Sit still, my daughter, until thou know how the matter will fall: for the man will not be in rest, until he have finished the thing this day. (Ruth 3:18, King James Version)

Sit still, my daughter. That is an instruction, and it is given to somebody in the middle of a situation that was not settled, by an older woman who knew exactly how unsettled it was.

And she does not say it will be fine. She says somebody else is working on it today, and the part belonging to the younger woman right now is to sit still.

You are given an instruction to sit still inside an unfinished thing, and sitting still has never once meant the matter stopped mattering. Ruth 3:18 tells a woman to be still in the middle of something unresolved rather than after it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets somebody put their back against a chair while things are still in the air.

I want to be careful with the second half of that verse, because this site does not hand out outcomes. What Naomi says is that the man will not rest until the thing is finished that day. She is not promising a result. She is describing where the work is.

You have never once been the only person working on this. The Spirit of God is the one who moves a task off a woman's shoulders for an afternoon, and it is written that the sitting still was given as the instruction while somebody else carried the finishing.

The perch is doing something and it is not what you think

Let me say the practical half, because this is the part people can act on.

Sitting on the edge is not laziness and it is not restlessness. It is a body in a state of readiness, kept there deliberately, because somewhere in the last year a decision got made that being fully seated would mean being caught out.

Caught out by what, usually, is a sound. Or a phone. Or a person coming in who might need something. The perch is an insurance policy against being found resting.

You are paying something out every day on a guard nobody has ever once asked you to keep. Ruth 3:18 hands the readiness to somebody else and gives the woman the sitting, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person put down an alertness they have been maintaining alone.

And I will say plainly what this page does not promise. Sitting all the way back is not going to make anybody well, and it is not going to fix your week, and I am not able to tell you what it will do. Permission is the whole of it.

You were never given a result here, and permission has never once needed one attached. The Spirit of God is the one who hands a woman an instruction without a forecast on the end of it, and what is written says sit still and then says who is doing the working.

The plain routing, and it comes before the chair

Here is the part of this page that is not comfort, and on an article about sitting down it goes before the invitation.

If something is happening right now that frightens you, that is 911, and no chair is the answer to it. If the heavy thing today is in your own mind, 988 answers, and a real person picks up. And if the tiredness itself has never been looked at, ring a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist today, and do that before you sit down anywhere.

You are permitted to do both in the same afternoon, and they have never once been alternatives. Ruth 3:18 puts the stillness inside an ordinary day with other work going on in it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a page about rest from becoming a reason to delay anything.

Ring first. Sit second. That is the only sequence on this page and I mean it.

You have a call and a chair, and the passage has never once asked anybody to choose between them. The Spirit of God is the one who is present in both, and what is written gives the instruction to sit still without ever suspending the rest of the day.