Nothing Left For The Ones I Love

The front door opens and a boy leans out with his socks on and shouts across the drive.

Mum. Are you coming in?

Two minutes, she says. Through the windscreen, with the engine off and the keys still in her hand and the kitchen light making a warm yellow square on the tarmac. Two minutes, love.

He goes back in. The door shuts. She sits.

She has been saying two minutes for about eleven weeks. Nobody has noticed, because two minutes is a perfectly ordinary thing to say and she is a perfectly ordinary distance from the door. Twenty feet of tarmac. That is all that is left of the commute, and she cannot cross it yet, and she cannot tell anybody why.

Here is why.

Everyone got the good version of her today. The woman on the phone at half past nine who was upset and needed somebody patient. The colleague who has been having a hard time. The man in the queue. The school office. She was warm all day. She was genuinely, actually kind, all day, to people whose names she will forget by Friday.

And the four people behind that door, the ones she would step in front of a bus for without thinking about it, are about to get whatever is left in the bottom of her. The flat voice. The mm over the homework. The nodding while somebody tells her something that matters to them and she is not hearing a word of it. Not because she does not love them. Because there is nothing left in the tin.

So she sits in the car and calls herself something ugly for about ninety seconds, and then she puts her keys in her bag and goes in and does it again.

I am going to say your name here, even though I do not know it, because I know exactly who is reading this.

You are not lazy and you are not cold. You are running a household, or a ward, or a class, or a business, or a parent who is failing, or three of those at once, and you have been running on fumes for so long that fumes feel normal. And the thing that is actually breaking your heart is not the tiredness. It is the arithmetic. That the strangers got the best of you and the ones you love got the last of you, and you cannot see any way to change the order.

I am not going to ask you for anything

Hear me before anything else. There is no assignment in this message.

I am not going to tell you to try harder. If trying harder were the medicine, you would have been well years ago, because trying harder is the one thing you have never stopped doing. I am not going to hand you a routine, or a list, or five habits, or one more thing to fit into a day that is already eating you. You have run out. That is not a character flaw to be corrected. It is a fact to be met.

And the guilt in that car is the heaviest thing you are carrying, heavier than the work, so let me take it off you first, because it is not telling you the truth.

You are not a bad mother. You are not a bad son, or a bad friend, or a bad pastor, or whatever word you use on yourself at twenty feet from your own front door. You are a person who has been pouring out for a long time from a container that nobody has been filling, and there is no version of that arithmetic that ends anywhere else. Empty is what happens to containers. It is not what happens to bad people.

Now let me show you who this next verse is addressed to, because it is not addressed to the strong.

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

Read the recipients. The faint. Them that have no might.

Not the capable. Not the ones with a bit in reserve. The word is written to the person with nothing, and that means your emptiness is not what disqualifies you from that verse, it is the address on the envelope. And the very next line says that even the young men faint and are weary and the strong ones fall flat out. So heaven is not surprised by you. This is described in the book. You are not an exception, you are a chapter.

And look at how God actually treats an exhausted servant, because there is a prophet in the Scripture who ran until he could not run and then sat down under a tree and asked to die.

Heaven did not send him a rebuke. Heaven sent him sleep. Then food. Then more sleep, then more food, and a hand that touched him and said the journey is too great for thee. Not you are weak. The journey is too great. And there was no instruction, not one word of assignment, until he had been fed twice and slept twice and been touched by something kind.

That is your God. That is how He handles the depleted, and He has not changed His methods since.

So the strength for those twenty feet of tarmac is not something you generate. It is something He gives, today, in the amount for today, the way the bread came down in the desert: fresh, daily, unhoardable, and always for people who could not make any of it themselves.