The Flare On The Good Week

The two tickets have been under the magnet on the fridge door for nine days.

Her daughter put them there. It was meant as a kindness and it was also a small act of faith, because for two years the answer to anything on a Saturday has been we will see how I am. And then the good stretch came. Eleven days. Not painless, nothing so grand as that, just eleven days where the volume came down enough that she could think about something other than getting through the afternoon.

She started to make plans out loud. That is the dangerous part and she knew it while she was doing it. She said the word Saturday in an ordinary voice, the way other people say it. She walked past the fridge and looked at the tickets and let herself picture the two of them going.

Thursday night, quarter past eleven, it came back.

Not gradually. It arrived the way it always arrives, and she lay very still in the dark and did the thing her body has trained her to do, which is to go quiet and wait and find out how bad this one is going to be. And underneath that, quieter still, a sentence she would be ashamed to say out loud.

I should not have let myself.

That is what the flare said this time. Not just the pain. A verdict. As though the eleven days had been advanced to her on credit and this was the collection, as though the crime was the tickets on the fridge door, as though hoping is the one thing her body will not forgive.

Friday morning she got up and she took the tickets down.

I know. I know exactly what you are doing right now, because you did not read that as a story about her, you read it as a report on your own life, and you already know what the tickets are in your house. A holiday. A grandchild's birthday. A job you nearly said yes to. The thing you took down off the fridge so that it could not disappoint you a second time.

Nobody is charging you for the good days

Beloved, let me get in front of the lie first, because it is standing between you and everything else I want to say to you.

The flare did not come because you hoped.

I want to say that slowly. Your good week was not borrowed. Nobody in heaven advanced it to you against your account and nobody came Thursday night to collect. There is no ledger in this. God is not running a scheme where the price of eleven good days is the twelfth, and He did not go quiet on you as a punishment for having plans on a Saturday. That whole framework is a debt system, and it is not the system you are living in. Grace has never once worked like that, in anybody's body, ever.

And now hear the deeper thing, the one that is actually hurting.

The pain is real and it is exhausting and I am not going to hurry past it. But the thing that took the tickets down off the fridge was not the pain. It was the fear of hoping. Something in you decided that hoping costs too much now, so you started paying less, and the cost of paying less is a smaller life, and you can feel it getting smaller, and you cannot see a way to stop it without setting yourself up again.

That is the part I have come for tonight.

So let me show you a man who asked three times.

And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.2 Corinthians 12:9

Paul asked for that thing in his body to be taken. Not once, politely. Three times, and the number is written down because it matters. He kept asking, and heaven never once told him he was asking wrong, and heaven never once told him his faith had failed, and if you have been carrying a suspicion that your body is a report card, that verse is where it goes to die.

What he got back was not silence and it was not a no. It was a Person. My grace is sufficient. Not sufficient for the good week and short in the bad one. Sufficient, which is a word that means enough, and enough is not a rationing.

And then look at where the power lands. My strength is made perfect in weakness. Not after the weakness ends. In it. Christ's power comes and rests, and the place it comes to rest is the exact spot you are most ashamed of, the part of you that has broken its promises, the hour of the night when it comes back.

Which means that Thursday, quarter past eleven, in the dark, going still and waiting to find out how bad it is going to be, is not the place He withdrew from. It is the place He rests.

I am not going to tell you what your body will do. I do not know, and anybody who tells you they do is selling something I will not sell. What I will tell you is what He said, and then I am going to put words in your mouth and stand next to you while you say them, because the Word is the ground and your mouth is the means, and that has been true since the beginning.

And take your care with you. Keep the appointment. Take what you have been prescribed, exactly as you have been told. There is nothing spiritual about coming off the thing that helps you, and God has never asked anybody to prove their faith by getting worse.