Holding It Together Far From Home

"How is everything?"

"Everything is good here."

"And the children?"

"They are good. Their school is good. The little one reads better than I do now."

"And the work?"

"The work is fine."

A pause on the line, the particular pause of a mother who is eleven hundred miles away and cannot see a face.

"You sound tired."

"It is late here. That is all it is."

He says it standing at the kitchen counter with the light off, because if he turns the light on he will see the washing up, and if he sees the washing up he will have to do it. It is twenty to twelve. He has been up since ten past five. Tomorrow he has a school form to fill in that is written in a register of the language nobody teaches you, an appointment to take his father in law to, a shift, and a landlord to ring back about the boiler for the fourth time.

He is the one who rings the landlord. He is the one who translates at the appointments. He is the one who reads the letters that come in the brown envelopes and decides, alone, at the counter with the light off, which ones are frightening and which ones are only paperwork. He is the one who says it is fine, it is nothing in two languages, in the same evening, to different people.

And he is not sad. That is what he cannot explain to anyone, least of all to his mother on the phone. He is not depressed and he is not ungrateful and he does not want to go back. He is empty. There is a difference, and nobody ever tells you about the difference. Sad has weather in it. Empty is just flat. It is getting through Tuesday and having nothing left over for anybody, including the people you did all of it for.

"Go to sleep," his mother says.

"Yes," he says. "I will."

He stands there for another eleven minutes after the call ends, in the dark, doing absolutely nothing.

Now let me stop calling him he.

Because you are the one who reads the brown envelopes. Maybe it is not a border, maybe it is a family where you became the adult early, or a house where you are the only one who knows where anything is kept. But you know that counter and that darkness and that eleven minutes. And you know that when somebody who loves you asks how you are, the true answer is not available in any language you have, so you say the good one.

Sit down somewhere. You do not have to open your eyes for the rest of this.

What He hands to the ones with nothing left

I am not going to ask you for anything. Let me say that at the top, because you are braced for it, and the bracing is costing you more than the request would.

There is no effort in this message. There is nothing here to add to Tuesday. If you have been reading things lately that told you to get up earlier, do more, push through, then you have been handed a bill by people who meant well, and you can put that bill down. Nobody who understood where you are would ask you for effort.

Here is what is actually true, and it is the whole thing.

There is a passage written to people who had lost their country. Not a metaphor: they had been marched a long way from home and they were living in someone else's city with someone else's language going past them in the street. And the accusation they kept making, over and over, was that God had stopped noticing.

The answer they got is one of the strangest sentences in the Scriptures, because of who it is addressed to.

He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength.Isaiah 40, verse 29

Read the recipients. Not the strong. Not the resourceful. Not the ones holding it together admirably. The faint. The ones with no might.

That is the qualification. Emptiness is not what disqualifies you from being supplied. Emptiness is the address the supply is delivered to.

And it goes further in the next lines, and this is the part I want you to hear standing in that dark kitchen. It says the young men, the fit ones, the ones with reserves, shall utterly fall. The people who are running on their own tank run out, every time, without exception. And then it says the ones who wait on the Lord have their strength renewed.

Not topped up. Renewed. Exchanged. It is not your energy improved. It is His energy given to you, which is a different substance altogether, and it does not come out of you.

So the arithmetic you have been doing at that counter is wrong, and it has been wrong for years. You have been calculating how much of you is left and dividing it between the school form and the appointment and the boiler and the children. Of course the answer keeps coming back zero. You are dividing a finite thing.

There is a supply that is not coming out of you. It is handed to the empty. It has your name on it and there is no application to fill in, which will be a relief to a person who has filled in enough forms this year to last a lifetime.