The Boy in the Folding Chair

If Christ Be Not Risen

The Boy in the Folding Chair

The room was too small for the number of chairs it held. Metal folding ones, borrowed from someone’s garage, pressed shoulder to shoulder. They made that thin, hollow groan whenever a person exhaled too deeply, a chorus of sighs that seemed to scold anyone who dared to fidget.

The church was a rented house—two bedrooms, one bath, one living room that smelled of instant coffee and worn carpet. The walls held framed verses yellowed by time, and the piano against the wall had a cracked key that always clicked louder than it sang.

My father sat beside me, close enough that I could see the wiry hairs in his nose when he bowed his head to pray. My brother sat on his other side, slouched and half asleep. My sister, too young to care, ran her fingers through the frayed ends of the carpet.

Our pastor was an old man, gentle and slow-spoken, the kind who repeated the same stories every few weeks. When he could, he sang a special before the sermon. His voice was thin but honest, trembling on the high notes like a bird caught in wind. The congregation—five of us, sometimes seven—listened as though we were guarding a candle from going out.

I remember the sunlight through the curtain dust, the hush before the final amen, and the way I used to stare at the window, wondering what freedom looked like out there.

At school, my friends didn’t go to church. They didn’t carry Bibles or bow before lunch. They spoke words we weren’t allowed to say and seemed happy for it. They looked free.

I remember thinking, I wish I could be like them—free of religion, free of guilt, free of my parents’ faith.

I had been saved, truly, when I was younger. I remembered the tears, the altar, the relief. But somewhere between that day and this one, my heart had gone cold. I wasn’t angry at God; I was just tired of belonging to Him.

And then came a thought that scared me even as it thrilled me: If only there were a way to get out—to prove it isn’t true. If Jesus didn’t really rise, then I’m free.

It wasn’t rebellion that moved me—it was exhaustion. I wanted peace without prayer, meaning without obedience. I wanted the cross to be a story that ended in a tomb, because then I could walk away without guilt.

But the strange thing about running from truth is that it keeps pace with you. The whisper followed me, even as I tried to silence it: If Christ be not risen...

That verse from Corinthians lingered like a stone in my shoe. Paul’s words weren’t gentle; they were a verdict. If Christ be not risen, your faith is vain... you are yet in your sins.

I didn’t know it then, but that question—the one that haunted a restless boy in a creaking chair—was the same one that once haunted a Roman soldier beneath a darkened sky.

The Soldier Beneath the Cross

He’d stopped thinking about mercy years ago.

To survive as a centurion, you learned to harden your heart. Orders were orders. Pain was just noise.

He’d been stationed in Judea for two long years—a land that smelled of dust, sweat, and superstition. The Jews spoke of one God and one Law, but all he saw was unrest. Every week, another prophet. Every week, another execution.

He remembered his first crucifixion, years ago, when his hands still trembled at the sight of blood. The condemned had screamed for his mother as the nails went in. The sound had haunted him for weeks until he learned the soldier’s cure for conscience: drink, duty, and distance. After enough blood, you stop hearing the screams.

But something about this one—the man they called Jesus—felt different even before the hammer fell. He didn’t plead for mercy or curse His judges. He looked at them with something else entirely. Pity, maybe. Or love.

When they lifted Him up, the crowd roared. The priests shouted triumph, the women sobbed, and his own men gambled for the dying man’s clothes. The centurion leaned on his spear, his face set against the sun. Another execution. Another fool who thought he was a king.

Then the man spoke. Not to curse, not to defend Himself, but to pray:

Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.

The words hit like a blow. The centurion straightened, scanning the faces around him. Who was He talking to? Who could He mean? Surely not the men who had nailed Him there. Surely not him.

He had heard every kind of death cry—rage, despair, defiance—but never forgiveness. Never love.

As the hours dragged on, something in the air changed. The light dimmed, though no clouds covered the sun. The laughter quieted. Even the birds vanished.

The man on the cross lifted His head again and cried out, My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?

The voice was raw, human, but there was power in it—a sound that carried more truth than the soldier’s whole life of orders and oaths.

Then the ground began to shake. Rocks split. The hill itself seemed to groan under the weight of the moment. The centurion stumbled, catching himself on his spear.

He looked up. The man’s head had dropped. His chest no longer moved. The silence that followed pressed against his chest like armor he couldn’t breathe in.

He tried to speak, but his throat was dry. The words came out rough, unplanned, unstoppable:

“Truly this was the Son of God.”

It was not an oath or a report—it was the sound of a heart cracking open.

That night, he didn’t join the others in their drinking. He sat outside the barracks, the wind moving cold through the olive trees. His hands still smelled of iron. He could still hear the hammer. He could still see those eyes—calm, steady, alive even in death.

He had killed many men. But this one had undone him.

He didn’t yet understand resurrection. But something in him already had begun to rise.

The Sinner Who Fought Him and Followed

He believed he was right. That was the dangerous part.

Saul of Tarsus had built his life on certainty. From childhood he had been shaped by the Law—every word memorized, every line recited until it became part of his heartbeat. His father, proud and stern, told him often that obedience was what separated them from the pagans. Saul believed it. He learned early to measure holiness by precision. There was no room for doubt, no patience for those who questioned.

When whispers began about a crucified rabbi named Jesus, Saul dismissed them as blasphemy. He’d never seen the man, but he’d seen the damage: peasants talking about resurrection, fishermen speaking of grace, men and women claiming freedom from the Law. He hated the word freedom. It sounded like rebellion dressed as faith.

He fought for God as he understood Him—with scrolls in his hands and fire in his eyes.

He remembered the first time he saw one of them die: Stephen, the preacher with a voice too steady for a man surrounded by stones. Saul stood close enough to hear the dull thud of rock on bone, to see the red spray across the dust. And over the noise, he heard words that shouldn’t have been there—Lord, lay not this sin to their charge.

The sound stayed with him. He washed his hands, but it lingered like smoke.

He threw himself into the work with new ferocity. Each arrest, each raid, each public beating was a strike against heresy. His elders praised him. “Saul defends the faith,” they said. And at night, when the city went quiet, he repeated it to himself until it felt true.

But zeal burns fast. It feeds on the soul that carries it. Somewhere between the raids, the anger began to exhaust him. He woke some mornings with his heart pounding for no reason, his throat dry from shouting. Still, he pressed on.

When the High Priest’s letter arrived—permission to pursue believers beyond Jerusalem—it felt like honor. Damascus would be the proof of his righteousness.

The road stretched before him, long and white in the sun. He traveled with companions who admired him, young men eager to see him at work. The heat shimmered, and he repeated Scripture to keep his focus: Cursed be he that confirmeth not all the words of this law to do them.

He had just spoken the last syllable when the world shattered.

A light tore through the sky—brighter than lightning, alive like fire. His horse reared. The sound that followed was not thunder but a voice, everywhere and nowhere all at once.

“Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?”

He fell, scraping his hands against the stones. “Who art Thou, Lord?”

“I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest.”

It was not accusation in the voice—it was sorrow. That was what broke him.

When the light faded, he opened his eyes and saw nothing. The sun burned, but he was blind.

They led him by the hand into Damascus. He said nothing. The man who had silenced others with law could no longer speak with certainty. His pride had cracked, and the cracks filled with fear.

For three days, he neither ate nor drank. The city moved around him—footsteps in the street, water splashing in jars—but none of it reached him. He sat in a room where the light pressed against his closed eyes like judgment.

He tried to pray as he once had, quoting psalms and blessings, but the words fell flat. It was as if God had stopped listening—or worse, had been the One speaking all along.

In the dark, faces came back to him—the people he’d condemned. The sound of stones striking flesh. The way Stephen’s eyes had looked at him, not with hatred, but with pity.

He whispered into the emptiness, “What wilt Thou have me to do?”

It was not the prayer of a scholar. It was the cry of a drowning man.

Miles away, another man was praying. Ananias. A believer. When the Lord told him to go to Saul, he trembled. “Lord, I have heard by many of this man, how much evil he hath done to Thy saints.”

But God said, “Go. He is a chosen vessel unto Me.”

Ananias went.

He found Saul sitting in the shadows, thinner now, smaller than the stories. The proud Pharisee looked like a child waiting for punishment.

Ananias laid his hands on the man’s face and said, “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus hath sent me, that thou mightest receive thy sight, and be filled with the Holy Ghost.”

The word brother hit harder than any rebuke.

Something like scales fell from Saul’s eyes. Light poured in—soft, gold, merciful. He blinked, wept, and fell forward, clutching the man who should have feared him.

When he rose, the world was different. It wasn’t just sight that had returned—it was soul.

Days later, he stood in a synagogue and spoke the name he once cursed. His voice shook, but it carried. The listeners froze. “Is not this he that destroyed them which called on this name in Jerusalem?”

Saul smiled through the tears. “Yes,” he said. “But now I know Him, and the power of His resurrection.”

That power would carry him through shipwrecks, prisons, and betrayals. It would turn scars into testimonies and chains into songs.

He had once lived to destroy, but now he lived to die daily—for the One who met him on that road.

Saul of Tarsus was gone. In his place stood Paul, a man remade by grace.

Scene 4: The Question That Hangs in the Air

We don’t know every detail about these two men—not every breath of the soldier’s fear, not every thought that passed through Paul’s mind as he stumbled blind into Damascus. But we know enough to imagine the weight of their decisions hanging in the balance of a single question:

Is He alive?

That question doesn’t belong to history alone. It’s the hinge of eternity. The axis on which faith either stands or collapses.

For the soldier, it followed him like a shadow. He went back to Rome with a commendation for his service and a sickness in his soul. The empire rewarded obedience, not conscience, and yet he found no peace in either. He would wake at night to the echo of the hammer and that strange prayer, Father, forgive them.

He tried to drown it in the noise of the barracks—the laughter, the wine, the orders—but the quiet always returned.

One night he dreamt of the cross again, but this time the man was not hanging there. The tomb was open. The voice that once cried, It is finished, spoke instead, Behold, I make all things new.

He awoke with tears on his face.

He had no theology, no scrolls, no teacher—only that haunting certainty that death had not been the end. That the man he had crucified was alive.

And somewhere across the desert, Paul carried that same fire. His letters would one day circle the world, but for now, the truth burned in his bones. He knew what it was to die and live again. He knew what it meant to face the darkness of guilt and rise forgiven.

The soldier and the apostle—two men who could not have been more different—met at the same cross from opposite sides.

Both had blood on their hands.Both were forgiven by the same Savior.

And both staked their eternity on the answer to that same question:

Is He alive?

If He wasn’t, they were fools—one haunted by guilt, the other blinded by delusion.If He was, then mercy was not a myth, and every wound had purpose.

That question still hangs in the air. It hangs in hospital rooms where prayers feel unanswered. It hangs in the faces of widows who still wear wedding rings. It hangs over the believer who feels their faith slipping and the skeptic who wishes they could believe again.

Is He alive?

If He isn’t, faith is a funeral, the cross a tragedy, and hope a lie.

But if He is—and He is—then even our doubts become doorways, even our graves become gardens.

Because everything depends on that dawn outside the borrowed tomb.

The soldier’s whisper, Paul’s surrender, and my own restless search—they all hang on this one truth that still breaks the silence:

He is not here.He is risen.

Scene 5: The Return and Reflection

Sometimes I still think of that small house church—the creaking chairs, the smell of instant coffee, my father’s bowed head, the old pastor’s trembling voice. It seemed so small then, so far removed from the world I thought I wanted.

But now I see it for what it was: a flickering light in the dark, held by people who believed not because they had seen, but because they knew.

I think of the soldier and Paul—two men who saw what I could not see in those days. One met mercy, the other met truth. Both met life.

They came to the same question that haunted me as a boy, sitting in that chair, half-wishing the gospel would fade: Is He alive?

The centurion’s answer came with trembling lips. Paul’s came with blind eyes opened.

And mine came much later, in the quiet after all my running, when the whisper I had tried to silence finally spoke peace instead of accusation.

He is alive.

And if He lives, then nothing is wasted—not the long sermons, not the creaking chairs, not even the years I spent doubting.

Because resurrection doesn’t erase the past—it redeems it.

That’s the miracle of it all.

The soldier found faith through compassion. Paul found it through conviction.And I found it through failure.

But it was the same Christ, alive and reaching for each of us.

If Christ be not risen, the story ends in a tomb. But since He is, the story begins there.

Now when I stand before people in borrowed halls or small mission chapels, I think of that old living room church. I see the same faith in new faces—the weary, the skeptical, the ones who wonder if God has forgotten them.

And I tell them what the centurion, Paul, and that restless boy all learned in their time: the tomb is empty, and that changes everything.

Because if Christ lives, then no night is final, no failure permanent, no heart too far gone.

That’s what resurrection means—it’s not an event we visit each spring; it’s the pulse that keeps our faith alive.

The church may still be small. The chairs may still creak. But the power that filled that empty tomb still fills the hearts that will believe.

And when I hear that old hymn—Because He Lives—I smile. Because now I know.

He lives.

And because He lives, I do too.

“Because I live, ye shall live also.” (John 14:19)