There is an empty chair sitting on our platform at church right now. The first Sunday people saw it, I’m sure they were wondering why a single chair was parked up front with nobody in it. It was there to remind us about the building we are planning. We do need the reminder, because we have outgrown our parking, our worship space, our fellowship area, and even our hallways. But the chair was never really about square footage. The chair is there to represent a person who has not come home yet. It marks a space for someone who is still on the outside, still wondering whether there is room for them anywhere.
I think about that chair a lot, because our community is full of people who feel like they do not belong. You can be surrounded by neighbors and still feel completely alone. Maybe you were recently divorced and the whole rhythm of your life changed overnight. Maybe you lost your spouse and the house has gone quiet. Maybe you just moved to West and you have not found your people yet. The Bible has a word for folks in that season. It calls them the solitary. And Psalm 68:6 tells us something beautiful about what God does for them. “God settles the solitary in a home.”
That is one of my favorite pictures of the church. We are not a building. We are not an event you attend on Sunday morning. We are the home where God settles people. Paul says it plainly to the church at Ephesus. “So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God” (Ephesians 2:19). Look at the movement in that one verse. Strangers become citizens. Citizens become family. That is the journey God walks every one of us through when we come to Christ. He does not leave us standing at the edge of the room hoping someone notices us. He adopts us, and He gives us a place at the table.
When I was a boy, I went to RAs at my church, which in those days was mostly a Baptist version of the Boy Scouts. I loved the camping and the cookouts and the BB guns. One night around the fire, our leader Al Ringle quietly slid a single hot coal out of the flames with a stick while we kept on telling jokes. After a while he pointed at it and asked why that one coal had turned gray and cold when all the others were still glowing red and orange. We told him the obvious answer. It was cold because he had pulled it out of the fire. Then he nudged it back in with his stick, and within a minute that gray coal was burning bright again, warmed by the coals around it and adding its own heat to theirs.
I have never forgotten that picture, because it is exactly how the Christian life works. A coal can technically still be a coal off by itself. You can be a believer and stay home, keep your distance, and never really connect with anybody. But why would you want to be a cold coal sitting all alone? Off by yourself you cannot warm anyone, and no one can warm you. Back in the fire, you are both helped and helping. That is what God designed His family to be. Proverbs 27:17 says, “Iron sharpens iron, and one man sharpens another.” But notice that sharpening only happens when the two pieces of iron actually touch. Two swords lying side by side in a pew never sharpen a thing. The growth comes in the contact, in the relationship, in the personal connection. The church is a family you belong to. Families eat together, argue together, carry each other’s burdens, and leave a light on for the ones who have not made it home yet.
So here is what I want you to do this week. First, if you feel like that gray coal off to the side, come back to the fire. Find a class, find a group, find one person who will sit with you. You were not made to glow alone. Second, if you are already warm, look around for the solitary. Somebody near you is waiting for an invitation, and you might be the one God uses to give it.
The empty chair on our platform is not a decoration. It is a promise that there is still room. As long as that chair sits there, we get to keep telling people the best news a lonely heart can hear. There is a place here for you, and the family is saving you a seat.
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