Nobody Takes The Other Half

Rain, the hard kind, coming sideways off the playing field and drumming on the roof of the car so loudly that the radio is pointless. Third in the line. Fourteen minutes until the doors open.

She is not doing anything. That is not quite true. She is sitting with her hands at the bottom of the wheel and her eyes on the wipers and she is not thinking about anything at all, which is different from resting, and she knows the difference by now.

There is a list. There is always a list. The form that needed signing yesterday. The younger one's shoes, which have gone through at the toe again. The appointment she moved twice and will have to move again. The washing that has been in the machine since this morning and will now need doing twice. It is not a heavy list. Any one item on it takes four minutes.

It is not the weight. It is that there is nobody to hand any of it to.

That is the specific thing, and if you live it you knew it before I finished the sentence. Other people are tired. Other people are stretched. But somewhere in most houses there is a moment where one person says can you do the shoes and another person says yes. There is a handover. There is a second pair of hands that has been briefed and does not need to be told where anything is.

In her house there is no handover. Every single thing that gets done, she does, and every single thing that does not get done is also hers, and there is no version of the evening where somebody says go and sit down for twenty minutes, I have got this.

And she is not sad. That is what she would tell you if you asked, and she would be telling the truth. She is not crying in a car park. She is empty, which is a different country from sad, and she has been living there since some point last spring.

The doors open. The rain does not stop. Two children come out at a run with their coats open and their bags dragging and she smiles, properly, because she loves them absolutely and completely and that has never once been in question.

There is Someone who takes the other half. I want to show you where He is standing.

The Shepherd walks at the speed of the one carrying young

Isaiah is describing God coming with strength, with a mighty arm, ruling. Big language. And then, in the same breath, without any change of gear, this:

He will tend his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms; he will carry them in his bosom, and gently lead those that are with young.Isaiah 40:11

Read the last clause slowly, because it is the one nobody quotes.

He gathers the lambs. Everyone knows that part. It is on cards. But then there is a second group in the sentence, and they are not the lambs. They are the ones carrying the lambs. The ewes heavy with young, the ones who cannot move at the speed of the flock, who fall behind not because they are weak but because they are carrying.

And what the Shepherd does with them is not carry them. It is gently lead them. He changes His pace. The whole flock goes at the speed of the ones who are carrying, because He is not going to leave them at the back and He is not going to shout them forward.

That is a picture of God adjusting Himself to you.

I want you to sit in that for a moment, because I think you may have been carrying a suspicion that you are the slow one. That everyone else is managing and you are behind. That if you were stronger or better organized or had more faith, this would not be taking everything you have.

The sentence says otherwise. The reason you are at the back is that you are carrying, and the Shepherd's response to a person who is carrying is to slow down and walk with them.

Now the thing I will not do. I am not going to tell you to try harder. Not one word of that. You do not need a system, a better morning routine, or an encouragement to press in, and if anyone has handed you those recently while you were running on nothing, I am sorry. You cannot pour out of an empty jug by squeezing it. Effort is not the medicine here and it never was.

Here is what is actually true, and it is the whole of the message.

The strength you have run out of was always the wrong strength. It was yours. It was finite and it was going to end, and it ending is not a moral event. What is on offer now is not a top up of the same thing. It is a completely different supply, and the way you receive it is not by working, it is by opening your hands.

Not because opening your hands is a technique. Because the God of Isaiah 40 is described in the same passage as the One who does not faint and is not weary, and whose understanding is unsearchable, and who gives power to the faint. To the faint. Not to the strong ones who have kept a bit back. The faint are the intended recipients. You are not disqualified by being empty. Empty is the address the delivery comes to.

And He is not waiting for you to be grateful about it first, or to have a quiet time about it first, or to feel anything at all. You are allowed to receive this flat, tired, in a car park, in the rain, with fourteen minutes on the clock.