This morning’s word is The Chair Where You Sit.
The anchor verses are 2 Kings 20:6 and Galatians 6:2.
Ten years ago, on a Monday morning, a barber in Des Moines, Iowa was cutting hair when he had a stroke.
His name is Craig Hunt. He owns University Barber Shop in Des Moines. The stroke happened one week after his son was born. He lost feeling on his left side. He lost the use of his dominant hand. The hand he made his living with.
In the hospital bed, he was scared. His own words. “Dang, am I going to lose movement? How am I going to work? What am I going to do?” He had a brand new baby at home, barbers and clients depending on him, and he could not move the hand that cut hair.
He recovered. He went back to work. That is already a story worth telling.
But the story did not end at the recovery.
A few years after the stroke, a man named Wesley Franklin came in for a haircut. Franklin works for the American Heart Association of Iowa. The two men got to talking, the way you talk in a barber’s chair, about hearts, about strokes, about the fact that one Monday morning Craig nearly died in this very shop. The conversation kept going. By the time Franklin left, an idea had been born.
It is called Blood Pressures in Barbershops.
Local nurses now come into barbershops across Iowa and take people’s blood pressure for free. Not in a hospital. Not in a clinic. In the chair where men go to get their hair cut, where men sit and talk and read the paper and watch the game on the small TV in the corner. In the place men go where nothing feels like a doctor’s visit.
The program is now in more than eighty shops across the state of Iowa.
Eighty.
A conversation in a barber’s chair became a statewide network. One man’s near-death became another man’s free blood pressure reading on a Tuesday afternoon. Someone, somewhere in Iowa, is alive this morning because of a number that someone took in a chair while waiting for a trim.
This is not a story about heroism. Craig Hunt did not set out to start anything. He went back to work, kept his shop open, and told the truth about what had happened to him when a stranger asked. The strong life force in this story is not in any one person. It is in what GOD does in the chair where you sit when you stop pretending you have everything together.
In the Second book of Kings this morning, a man named Hezekiah is told by the prophet Isaiah that he is going to die. There is no recovery. Put your house in order. Hezekiah does not argue. He turns his face to the wall and weeps and asks GOD for mercy. And GOD answers, through Isaiah, with these words.
“I will add fifteen years to your life.”
Fifteen years.
The question that Scripture asks Hezekiah, and asks every one of us who has been given days we did not think we would see, is what we do with the added years.
Hezekiah did not always do it well. He made mistakes. He grew proud. The Bible does not pretend he became a saint after his healing. But he had fifteen more years, and the question stood. What is this time for.
Craig Hunt had a stroke and got his own version of added years. He could have spent them quietly. He could have closed the shop. He could have decided that surviving was enough. Instead, he turned the chair where he had nearly died into the chair where someone else might be saved. The Apostle Paul wrote to a small church in Galatia, “Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.”
The chair is where the burden gets carried. Not the pulpit. Not the conference stage. The chair.
Wherever you are, whatever you do, there is a chair in your life. A place where people come and sit with you. It might be a desk. A counter. A kitchen table. A car. A workshop. A waiting room. A phone you keep picking up. It might be a place you do not yet recognize as a chair, because you do not think of yourself as someone people come to.
But they do. Somebody comes.
And what GOD did with a barber in Des Moines who almost died ten years ago is what GOD can do with whatever you have been given since the moment you almost lost everything. The added years are not for you to spend on yourself. They are the burden you get to carry for someone else.
You do not need a platform. You need a chair, and the willingness to tell the truth about what happened to you when a stranger asks.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.