The Day I Could Not Leave The Car

"I'm here. I'm literally outside. Two minutes."

She said it brightly. She has a bright voice for exactly this, and she used it, and then she put the phone face down on the passenger seat and did not move.

The engine was off. The heater was cooling and ticking. Somebody walked past the bonnet with a bag and did not look in. Through the glass doors she could see the room she was supposed to be walking into, and the people in it, and one of them checking the door because she had said two minutes.

It was not that she did not want to go in. She loves those people. It was that she got to the end of the drive and discovered there was nothing in the tank for the walking in. Not for the door, not for the hello, not for the arranging of her face. She had spent it all somewhere between Tuesday and here, and she had no idea where, because nothing dramatic had happened. That is the part nobody understands. There was no crisis to point at. She was simply out.

So she sat in a cooling car with her hands in her lap and watched a door she could not open, and the worst of it was not the tiredness. It was the arithmetic that came with it: what is wrong with me, that this is hard.

Beloved, if you are sitting somewhere right now with the engine off, I am not going to ask you to go in. Not yet. Not in this message. Sit where you are and let somebody talk to you for a minute.

I am not going to ask you for anything

Let me get the useless things off the table first, because you have had them offered to you by kind people and every one of them cost you energy to receive.

I am not going to tell you to push through. Push through with what. That advice assumes a reserve, and the whole problem is that the reserve is where the hole is.

I am not going to give you a routine, a discipline, a plan for your mornings, or a list. A list is a bill, and you cannot pay a bill with an empty account, and handing you one at this exact moment would only give you a fresh thing to fail at by Thursday.

And I am not going to tell you to try harder, in any accent, however gently phrased. You have been trying so hard for so long that trying is the muscle that gave out. There is nothing in this message for you to do except sit still and receive, and if that sounds too easy, hold on, because it is the hardest thing I could have asked of a person like you.

Now let me name the low place honestly, because you have not said it out loud to anybody.

You are not sad. You keep saying that and people keep hearing modesty. You mean it literally. There is no grief in this, no obvious wound, nothing you could point to that would make it make sense to a listener. There is just flatness where the feelings used to be, and a body that arrives everywhere already finished, and a quiet horror underneath it that this might now be who you are.

And you are ashamed of it, which is the cruellest part, because you have looked at what you actually carry and decided it does not justify being this tired. So you have added the shame on top of the exhaustion, and carried both, and told everyone you are fine.

What He gives, and to whom

Now hear what this whole message stands on, and hear who it is addressed to.

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

Read the recipients. Not the strong. Not the disciplined. Not the ones who kept their reserves topped up and their mornings ordered. The faint. The ones with no might. That is not a description of people who failed at the strength thing, it is the eligibility criterion, and you meet it exactly.

We have made an unspoken theology in which the tired are on probation. It is not in the text. God does not distribute strength as a reward to the people who least needed it. He gives power to the faint, which means faintness is not a disqualification, it is the address on the parcel.

And there is one more thing in that chapter I want you to have, because it comes right at the end and it says the quiet part. Even the young get exhausted. Even the ones built for it fall flat on their faces. The people who wait on the Lord change their strength, they exchange it, they hand over a strength that has run out and are given one that has not. That is not the same as being topped up. That is a different supply entirely, coming in from outside, and it does not depend on how much of your own you had left when you asked.

You have not run out of God. You have run out of you. Those were always two different tanks, and only one of them was ever yours to fill.