Every Third Saturday In That Chair

Nine years, every third Saturday, half past nine in the morning.

He knows the sound of the door. He knows the chair. He knows that if he goes on the second Saturday of the month there is a man ahead of him who talks the whole way through, and so he does not go on the second Saturday of the month.

The barber's name is Tony. He is somewhere around sixty. He has a photograph taped to the mirror of a boy in a graduation gown and another one, older and browner, of a woman on a beach.

They talk about football. They talk about the road being dug up. They have a running thing about a restaurant that closed. Tony asks about the children by name and he asks about Tony's back, which has been bad for two years.

Nine years is somewhere north of a hundred and fifty haircuts.

And he does not know one true thing about that man. Not who the woman on the beach is, or was. Not whether the boy in the gown is still in the country. Not whether Tony believes in anything or ever has.

And Tony does not know one true thing about him.

There is a version of this article that would tell him to say something. That is the obvious move and it is the wrong one, and I want to say why. He has thought about saying something for nine years. He has rehearsed openings in the car. Every one of them dies in his mouth because it arrives out of nowhere and lands on top of a conversation about football, and a man in a cape with hair on his shoulders can feel the size of it.

The problem is not that he has not spoken. It is that in nine years he has never once asked.

He asked her for a drink

The longest theological conversation Jesus has with anybody in the gospels starts in the least theological way imaginable.

There cometh a woman of Samaria to draw water: Jesus saith unto her, Give me to drink.John 4:7

Take that in the chair with the cape on. You are equipped to open this with a question and nothing else. The word has Him asking a woman for a drink, and it is the Holy Spirit who goes into a life through a door somebody opened themselves.

He asks her for something.

Sit with how strange that is. He is the one with everything to give and He opens by requesting a favor from a woman who had every reason to expect nothing but trouble from a man like Him.

And that is the door. She answers. She questions Him. She raises the political thing, the religious thing, the mountain and the temple. Every bit of the conversation that follows comes through a door He opened by needing something from her.

He did not begin with a statement. He began with an ask.

So take this in that chair, and know it is not my technique, it is what is written: you are equipped to open this with a question, right now, on the third Saturday of the month. His word shows the Lord Himself starting at a well by asking, and it is the Holy Spirit who goes ahead of a question into a man's life in a way no prepared opening ever manages.

There was a preacher in England in the seventeen hundreds who went outdoors because the people he wanted were not going to come indoors. Everybody remembers the fields.

Fewer people remember what he actually did when he arrived.

He went into prisons and sat with men who were going to be hanged, and he asked them things. He went down into pit villages and asked people about their work and their money and their children, and he built a movement whose central instrument was a room where six people were asked out loud how it stood with them.

The whole apparatus he invented runs on a question. Not a speech. A question, asked by somebody who intended to stay for the answer.

He never said a word against the gathered church, which he loved and never left. He simply understood that a person is opened by being asked about, not by being addressed.

You have been rehearsing statements for nine years. The tool you needed was in the other hand the whole time.