Going Through The Motions

His hands are in the water and the plate has been clean for a while now.

He has not noticed. It is twenty past eight and he is at the sink doing the thing he does every night, the cloth going round and round a plate that stopped needing it about forty seconds ago, and his eyes are on the window, where there is nothing to see except the kitchen behind him, doubled.

The house is fine. That is what he would tell you if you asked, and it would be true. The children got where they needed to go this week. The work went out on Friday and it was good work, better than most. He read at the front on Sunday and a woman stopped him afterwards to say it had been exactly what she needed that morning, and he thanked her, and he meant the thank you, and he felt nothing whatsoever.

He is not sad. He would want that understood, because people keep reaching for sad and it is the wrong word. Sad has a shape. Sad has weather in it and moves through. This is flat. This is a man doing every single thing correctly from somewhere outside himself, watching his own hands do it, wondering in a distant sort of way when the person who used to live in here went out and whether anybody saw him go.

Four months, near enough. It came on so slowly that there was never a day to point at.

And here is the part he has told nobody, standing at that sink. He has begun to suspect that the flatness is a verdict. That a man who really believed any of it would feel something. That everyone around him is receiving and he is miming, and that if he said so out loud, the miming would be the thing they remembered about him.

So he says nothing, and he dries the plate that was already dry, and he puts it away.

The promise has an address on it

I am going to hand you one line, and before I say a word about it, I want you to hear the envelope it came in.

He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength. Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength.Isaiah 40:29 to 31

Now hear who is named there. The faint. The one who has no might. Not the willing. Not the ones running on a little and hoping for more. The ones with none.

That is the address on the envelope, and you are the only person it fits.

Notice too who falls over in that verse. The young men. The strongest ones in the picture, the ones with everything in reserve, and the text says plainly that they will hit the floor exhausted. God is not holding up strength as the qualification. He is saying strength runs out on schedule and it always has, and it was never the fuel.

So let me say this before anything else, and let me say it as plainly as I know how.

I am not going to hand you a discipline. Not a plan, not a habit, not a thing to get up early for. A person with nothing left cannot be helped by being asked for more, and anyone who asks you for more right now has misread the room. You are not lazy. You are empty, and those two things look nothing alike from the inside and nearly identical from the outside, which is why almost nobody gets this right.

Now, the word underneath all of it. Wait for the LORD.

In the old language that word is not sitting about. It is the word for a cord, for twisting strands together into one rope. To wait is to be twisted onto Him, to let your one thin fiber be wound into something with a breaking strain that is nothing to do with you. A rope does not renew a strand. It carries it.

That is why the promise can be made to people with no might. It never asked them to produce anything. It asked them to be attached.

And let me name your pit properly before we go on, because you have been alone in it for months.

The loneliest thing in your life right now is that nothing is wrong. Nobody has died. Nobody has left. You have no reason to hand anyone, so you have stopped mentioning it, and the silence has slowly turned into a private case against you. You have started grading your own faith by your own feeling, every day, and losing.

Hear this. The heart is what He looks at, and He is not reading the dial you are reading. You are not a man miming. You are a man being carried through a season, and being carried does not feel like anything, which is exactly why you cannot detect it.