Running On The Last Of It

"How are you?"

"Yeah. Fine. Busy."

That took two seconds. Then the automatic doors, then the car park, then the eleven minutes she spent sitting in the driver's seat with the key in her hand and the engine off, not crying, not thinking, not doing anything at all. Eleven minutes. She only knows it was eleven because the clock on the dash was showing one number when she sat down and a different one when something in her started the car.

She is not sad. That is the part nobody understands when she tries to explain it, so she has stopped trying. Sad would be something. Sad has a shape and a reason and eventually a bottom. This has no shape. It is more like the sound a tap makes when the water has been off for a while and there is nothing left in the pipe but air.

She still does everything. That is the strange bit. The lunches are made. The messages get answered, a day late but they get answered. She turns up. If you saw her this week you would say she seemed a bit tired.

And underneath, a long way down, a small flat voice that says: I do not know how much further this goes.

She has been like this since roughly March. It is now well past March.

That may be you. And if it is, let me say the thing first, before any teaching, before anything: you are not lazy, you are not spiritually deficient, and you have not backslidden. You are a person who has been running an engine past the point the fuel light came on, for months, and the reason you are empty is not that you failed to be full. It is that you have been pouring out for a very long time and nobody has been pouring in.

You are safe here. Nothing is going to be asked of you in this message. I mean that as a promise and I intend to keep it.

The one place your weakness is not a problem

Here is what usually happens to a person in your condition, and it is why you have stopped reading things like this.

Someone notices. They mean well. And what they hand you is a task. Get more rest, they say, as though rest were something you had refused. Set some boundaries. Pray more. Take a break. Every single one of those is another thing to do, added to the pile of things you already cannot do, and each one lands on you as one more failure with a friendly face on it.

So we are not doing that. Not one instruction is coming your way.

Instead, look at what God actually says about the state you are in, because it is not what you have been braced for.

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

Sit with the second half of that. To them that have no might.

Not to them who are running a little low. Not to those who could rally if they really tried. To the ones with none. Nothing. Zero. The condition you have been apologizing for is the exact condition named in the verse as the one that qualifies you, and it does not qualify you by being impressive. It qualifies you the way an empty cup qualifies for water.

There is a whole way of thinking about God that has to go here, and I think you may already have half suspected it was wrong. It goes like this: God helps those who help themselves, so bring Him something to work with. Bring effort. Bring a bit of enthusiasm. Come with something in your hands, because surely He is not going to move on behalf of somebody who is just lying there.

That sentence is nowhere in Scripture. What is in Scripture is a God who gives power to the faint, and a Christ who said come to me all who are weary and heavy laden, and not one word anywhere about arriving in good condition.

I want to be very plain about something, because this is where the harm is done and I will not do it to you. The reason you are empty is not weak faith. Your emptiness is not a spiritual diagnosis and it is not a verdict on your walk with God. Elijah, days after fire fell out of the sky at his own word, sat under a tree and asked God to let him die. God's response was not a rebuke. It was sleep, and then food, and then more sleep, and then more food, and only after all that a conversation.

Notice the order. Nobody preached at that man until he had eaten twice.

And I will say the other true thing here too, gently, because it belongs in this category and I am not going to wait for you to hint at it. If the flatness has turned into a thought that the world would be better off without you, or if you have begun to think about not being here at all, that is the point where this message stops and a human being starts. In the United States, call or text 988 and someone will answer. Anywhere else, ring your local emergency number or crisis line. And tell one real person in your life, today, out loud. That is not a failure of faith. It is the most faithful thing available to you, and it is what I would want somebody to do for me.