Strength That Is Not Yours to Manufacture

The kettle is going in the kitchen and she is not in the kitchen. She is sitting on the stairs.

Eight steps up with the laundry basket on her hip, and somewhere around the eighth her legs went hot and strange, and she sat down on the ninth. That was four minutes ago. The kettle has already clicked itself off. It is twenty to twelve in the morning. One sock hangs over the edge of the basket beside her, and she is looking at that sock the way a person looks at something that has beaten them.

In February it was a virus. That is the whole of it. Half the office had it. Half the office complained for a fortnight and went back to normal, and she went back to normal too, in the sense that the cough left and the fever left and her sense of taste came shuffling back somewhere in the third week.

And then there was the thing that did not leave.

A tiredness that sleep does not touch. Nine hours in the dark and she wakes up flattened, as though the night had happened to somebody else. She knows her afternoons now the way a fisherman knows weather. Two o'clock is a wall. Anything that is going to happen has to happen before it, and the list of things that happen has been getting shorter since March without anyone announcing it.

The bloodwork is normal. Three times normal. Her doctor is kind and her doctor has run out of roads, and the last appointment ended with the words let us give it more time, which were said gently and landed like a door.

But the hardest part is not the stairs, and it is not the two o'clock wall.

The hardest part is the vocabulary. There is no word left for this that has not already been spent by people who mean something smaller. Tired belongs to someone who stayed up too late. Worn out belongs to a busy week. Whatever she says, the other person nods and says they know exactly, and then tells her about their own Thursday, and she smiles, because what else, and the true sentence goes back down her throat where it lives.

So she has started saying she is fine. A bit run down. She says it to people at work. She has begun saying it to her own sister.

You know the ninth stair.

You have your own version of it, and your own two o'clock, and your own list that keeps getting shorter without a meeting being called about it. You have the same run of normal results and the same kind doctor and the same sentence with nowhere to land. And underneath all of it you have the quiet accusation that started up sometime in the spring and has not shut up since: that a stronger person would be up those stairs by now. A more disciplined person. A person with more faith.

Stay sitting. Do not get up yet. Let me come and sit down two steps below you.

He hands it to the ones who have run out

I am not going to open by telling you what this is or how long it lasts, because I do not know, and a man who does not know should say so before he says anything else.

Here is what I do know, and I want to name it before I lift anything, because a lift that skips the naming is just noise.

You have been bereaved and nobody has called it that. Something was taken from you in February and never given back, and it was not a limb and it was not a diagnosis anyone can point to on a screen, so there was no card, no casserole, no week off. You lost your capacity. You lost the version of yourself who could say yes without doing arithmetic first. You are grieving a person you still have to be every morning, and you are doing it with no vocabulary and no witnesses.

And you have been carrying, on top of that, the suspicion that this is somehow your doing. That is the part I want out of your hands first, because it is the heaviest thing in the room and it does not belong to you. Your body is not accusing you. A body that has been through something and has not come all the way back is not a character reference. It is a body. Isaiah 40:29 puts power and faint in the same breath, which is not a sentence a capable man would ever have thought to write, and His Spirit was behind that pen.

Now listen to who this next sentence was written for. It was not written for the strong. It was written to a people who had been carried off, worn down, out of ideas, in a country that was not theirs, in the middle of the longest run of comfort in the whole book of Isaiah.

He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength.Isaiah 40:29

Read the arithmetic in that, because it is upside down from everything you were raised on.

He gives power to the faint. Not to the capable, so they can do more. To the faint. And He increases the strength of the one who has no might, which is a strange sentence if you look at it, because you cannot increase nothing. Unless what He is doing is not increasing your supply at all. Unless He is handing over His own, into hands that are empty, and empty is not a problem He has to solve first. Empty is the qualification. The handing over is His Spirit's work and not your willpower having one more go at it, and Isaiah 40 was addressed to a whole nation that had already run out.

You have spent six months trying to manufacture strength. Coffee, discipline, willpower, the good week where you overdid it and paid for it for four days. You have been running a factory that has no raw material in it and blaming the workers.

He is not asking you to run the factory. He is offering to be the supply.

And let me say one plain thing here, from me to you, because it should come from the person praying for you and not from a stranger on the internet. Keep your appointments. Take what you are prescribed, exactly as they told you. Go back when they say come back. None of that is a lack of faith and it never was. God hands out steady hands and clear thinking and patient specialists, and receiving what He has already put in the room is not a failure to trust Him for something better. The Spirit who gives power to the faint is perfectly willing to give some of it through a pharmacist.

I will tell you something else, and it is the only credential I bring to your staircase. The people who have carried me best in my life were never the ones who arrived with a clean before and after. They were the ones who still limped. Jacob wrestled all night, and he prevailed, and he walked away with a hip that never worked properly again, and Scripture keeps both facts in the same sentence for the rest of his life. He won. He limped. That is not the transformation failing. That is what the transformation looks like from the inside.

So I am not going to hand you a testimony with the limp edited out. I am going to sit here on the stair.