“The Empty Chair,” Ensign, Jan. 1991, 56–57
The Empty Chair
Sister Bessan watched the children file into the classroom. She tried to imagine their personalities from their facial expressions: What were they like? She hadn’t had a seven-year-old in her home for several years now, and she had been slightly apprehensive about accepting a calling as a Primary teacher. But her uneasiness disappeared when she looked in the children’s faces.
She was certainly glad that someone had placed enough chairs in the room, for all eleven of her young students were in attendance. As her eyes scanned the room, however, she noticed an empty chair standing alone behind the children. It seemed to be calling her. Sister Bessan shrugged off the uneasy feeling and began welcoming her class.
The eager-to-learn expressions and smiling faces excited her. Calling the roll was a must this first time: She wanted to call each child by name, to make each feel loved and special. But as the last “here” sounded, the empty chair again drew her attention. “How could someone be missing?” she wondered. No other names appeared on the roll.
Again shrugging off the unexplained feeling, she continued with the lesson and, much too soon, the class period ended. As the children found their benches at Sharing Time, Sister Bessan found herself turning around to look for another child, even though she knew that all of “her” children were there.
When prayer closed the meeting and the children left to find their parents, Sister Bessan walked home with a feeling of accomplishment. She thought of her class—surely the best in the Primary—of her family, and, for some reason, of the empty chair. She could visualize it—standing in the room all alone—and the feeling returned. Again and again she could picture it, feeling more and more uneasy.
What is this chair trying to tell me? she wondered. She had seen a lot of empty chairs in her life, but none of them had affected her in this way. For the next two Sundays, there it stood. Even when two of the children were absent, only one empty chair was there, each time giving her an uneasy feeling.
She began praying about the chair, asking Heavenly Father to help her understand why it seemed to beckon her. She prayed several times about the same question, but didn’t receive an answer.
One morning she stood at her front window watching the children passing her house on the way to school. To her surprise, a big yellow school bus slowly came down her street—an unusual occurrence, since all of the children in Sister Bessan’s neighborhood walked to school. As she wondered what the bus was doing in her subdivision, the bus stopped at a house that used to be in another ward before the ward’s boundaries were changed.
A young mother pushing a wheelchair came out of the house; in the wheelchair was a red-haired little boy. The bus driver paused while the mother kissed the boy, then he lifted the wheelchair into the bus with a lever and drove off. The mother waved goodbye to the child before going back into the house.
As Sister Bessan turned to go inside her home, the Spirit spoke to her with a burning feeling so strong that it almost took her breath away. That child in the wheelchair was supposed to be in her class. The empty chair was his. She knelt by her sofa to thank Heavenly Father for answering her prayers.
She called the Primary president to ask about the boy and learned that his name was Shawn and his family was indeed active in the ward. But Shawn had always attended his parents’ Sunday School class because of his severe handicap. A few days later Sister Bessan visited Shawn’s home and invited him and his parents to visit her class.
The following Sunday, Shawn and his mother came to her Primary class, wheelchair and all. Sister Bessan wasn’t surprised to find only enough chairs for those present. The empty chair’s space had been filled with a very special chair.