Four Hours in the Chair

The comb parts another line and the braider's fingers start again at the scalp, quick and tight, and she has learned over thirty years of Saturdays not to flinch at the first pull.

Four hours in. Two to go. The salon is loud in the way she loves: three chairs, three braiders, somebody's daughter asleep on the sofa under a coat, the kettle going, and the radio on the shelf between the hair oil and the tub of gel, tuned to the gospel station the way it always is. Her phone is in her lap under the cape, and she has a psalm open on it, because four hours in a chair is four hours, and she reads a verse and closes her eyes and reads it again while the fingers work. As a deer pants for streams of water. She has read that verse more times than she could count and it still does something to her, still lifts under her ribs like something with wings in it, and she has never once told anybody that, because it sounds like too much.

That is the thing. It has always been too much. Thirty years in church and there is one hunger in her that has never gone quiet. Not for a husband, not for a house, not for a better job. For Him. For more of Him. She goes forward when nobody else goes forward. She stays after when everybody has gone. She reads on the bus and in the queue and under a braiding cape, and she has spent thirty years quietly ashamed of it, because the people she respects seem settled and she is not settled, she is starving, and a woman her age with her years should surely be full by now.

And then the preacher on the radio, in the middle of a sermon nobody in the salon is really listening to, says it. Some of you are never satisfied. Always chasing a feeling. Always wanting more. Learn to be content. And three chairs keep working and the kettle clicks off and nobody looks up, and she sits very still under the cape with the psalm open in her lap and hears it as a verdict, read out over her head, in public, and she thinks: he is right, and I have known it for thirty years.

That chair is yours. You have a hunger you have been apologizing for since before you had words for it, and somebody, or you yourself, has told you it is a fault. Stay with me. I want to show you what Jesus called that hunger, and it was not a fault.

He called it blessed

Here is the first thing, and it is a matter of what Jesus actually said before it is a matter of comfort. On the hillside, in the sermon everybody has heard bits of, He went down a list of the people He called blessed, and one of them was you:

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.Matthew 5:6

Read the shape of that sentence. Blessed are the hungry. Not the full. Not the settled. Not the ones who have learned to want less. He put the hunger in the blessing column, in front of a crowd, out loud, and then He said what happens to the hungry: they are satisfied. And here is the thing the radio preacher missed. He did not say the hunger is cured. He did not say blessed are the hungry because one day they will stop being hungry. He said blessed are the ones who hunger and thirst, present tense, ongoing, and they are fed. Both at once. The hunger is the shape of the blessing. The feeding is what the hunger is for.

You have a hunger Jesus called blessed, in His own voice, on the record, and nobody in a salon or a pulpit outranks the One who said it. I am not softening the sermon for you. I am reading you what is written on the mountain, and it is the Holy Spirit who put that hunger in a woman under a braiding cape in the first place, because nobody pants for God on their own initiative. That was Him. The hunger came from Him and it is aimed at Him and He is not embarrassed by it.

The apostle who never got full

Now let me name the thing actually being carried in that chair, because you deserve to hear it said back to you plainly. It is not that the wanting is too much. It is that the wanting has been filed as evidence against you: that a mature person would be settled by now, that a woman with your years should have arrived, and that the hunger which has never gone quiet is proof you never learned contentment and never really received. And under that, quieter, the fear that God Himself is tired of a person who keeps coming forward.

Hear me. The most mature man in the New Testament wrote a letter from a prison cell near the end of his life, and in it he said this: not that I have already obtained it, or am already perfect, but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. That is Paul, decades in, apostle to the nations, and he is still hungry. He is not ashamed of it. He does not call it immaturity. He calls it pressing on, and he says the reason he can press is that he was already laid hold of. The hunger and the having, both at once, in the same sentence, from the man who wrote most of your New Testament.

You are in the best company Scripture has when you are still hungry after thirty years, and the hunger is not the sign of a woman who missed something; it is the sign of a woman who tasted. David panted like a deer. Paul pressed on from a cell. And it is His Spirit who keeps the wanting alive in you, because a hunger for God that had gone quiet would be the thing to grieve, not the one that has not.

If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink.John 7:37

Jesus stood up on the last day of the feast and shouted that. He did not say if anyone thirsts, let him learn to manage it. He said come and drink. So the thirst is the invitation, and the drinking is what He does with it, and no one who came to Him thirsty was ever sent away with a lecture on contentment.

Aimed, not cured

I want to say this as plainly as I know how, because it is where the whole thing turns. This site never tells anybody to want less, and I would not tell you if it did, because Jesus never did. The hunger for Him is not the problem to be solved. It is the compass. It is the one appetite in you that has been telling the truth for thirty years, pointing at the only table where it is met, and everything the radio told you to do with it, quiet it, shrink it, be embarrassed by it, was a way of unscrewing the needle from the compass.

So it is not cured. It is aimed. You are not going to leave this article less hungry, and I would be lying to you if I said you should. You are going to leave it hungry in the right direction, with your mouth open, asking plainly for the thing you have been apologizing for. And here is what He does with a mouth open in His direction: He fills it. And here is what He does not do: He does not then say, good, now stop. Filled as you hunger. Hungering as you are filled. That is the shape of a soul that has found the well and keeps coming back to it, and it is the shape He blessed.

You are filled as you hunger, and the hunger is not a defect, and no one is going to take it off you, least of all Him. That is written in the blessing and it is written in the shout at the feast, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the filling, in the chair, today, without asking you to be less first.