There is a hall he can still walk around in his head, and it has ninety six chairs in it.
He knows the number because he set them out for eleven years, six across and sixteen deep, with the aisle a chair and a half wide because the woman with the walking frame needed it. He knows the smell of the floor polish and the particular groan the shutters made and which of the strip lights buzzed. He knows that the urn took twenty two minutes and that if you switched it on before you started the chairs, the tea was ready exactly when the first car pulled in.
He was good at it. That is the part he cannot put down. He was good at it and it cost him nothing, and he would have told you then that he could do it for another twenty years without thinking.
He does not go there any more. Not because anything happened. Nothing happened. There was no falling out and no scandal and nobody hurt him, which is somehow worse, because it leaves him with no story to explain the fact that he can no longer make himself do a thing he loved for eleven years.
He took two weeks off in the spring. He slept properly for the first four nights, which he took as evidence, and then went on sleeping and went on being exactly as empty on the fourteenth morning as on the first. He came back and somebody said he looked rested and he agreed with them, out loud, and something in him went very quiet.
That is the thing nobody warns you about. There is a kind of empty that rest does not touch. You can sleep in it, take a holiday in it, come back from a fortnight in the sun still holding it, and every ordinary remedy that used to work slides off, and after a while you stop reaching for them, because a remedy that fails is worse than no remedy at all.
If that is you, put down whatever you were about to make yourself do. There is nothing in this for you to attempt.
Nobody told you the tank was yours
Here is what has quietly gone wrong, and it is not a character fault.
Somewhere in the good years you learned that you were a container. You filled up, you poured out, you refilled, and the arithmetic worked, and because it worked you never questioned it. Sleep in, energy out. Rest in, service out. You were the tank, and the tank was you, and the whole system depended on the tank being fillable.
Then the tank stopped taking a charge, and because you had never located your strength anywhere else, you concluded that you had run out permanently. Not tired. Finished.
I want you to hear the word God speaks over exactly that, because it is not the word you are braced for.
He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint.Isaiah 40:29-31
Read who it is addressed to. The faint. Them that have no might. Not the ones running low, the ones with none. Emptiness is not what disqualifies you from this verse. It is the address on the envelope.
And then read the middle line, because everybody skips it. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall. The strongest, freshest, most capable people in the world fall over. That is not written as a warning. It is written as a comfort. The prophet is telling you that the tank was always going to fail, in everybody, and that finding out it fails is not a discovery about your particular weakness. It is a discovery about tanks.
Now the word that carries the whole thing. They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. Waiting has been sold to you as a kind of effort, a spiritual clenching, holding on grimly until something arrives. It is not that. The root of it is closer to twisting strands together, one thing bound into another until the strength of the new rope is not the strength of either strand. Waiting is not you straining upward. It is you being wound into Him.
Which means the strength never gets handed to you as a fresh tank. It is not deposited into a container you are still responsible for keeping topped up. It is His, running through the place where you are joined to Him, and the reason you cannot find the bottom of it is that you are not the one holding it.
You have been trying to refill something God was never asking you to own.
So here is what I am not going to ask you to do. I am not going to ask you to try harder, dig deeper, push through, get back on the horse, or find one more percent. If one more percent existed you would have spent it in March. There is nothing left and I believe you.
Here is what I am asking instead, and it takes no energy at all, because it is not an action. It is a position.
Stop producing and start receiving.
That is the whole turn. You are not being asked to generate strength, you are being asked to stop pretending the strength was ever generated in you. The eagles in that passage are not flapping. Watch one. It finds the rising air and opens, and the lift is not coming from the bird. That is what is being offered to you at the exact moment your own wings have nothing left in them.
And I want to say one plain thing, gently, because emptiness this long can be more than tiredness. If this flatness has gone past being empty and into not wanting to be here at all, that is a different weight and it must not be carried on your own. Tell one human being today, out loud. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour. Wherever you are, there is a local crisis line and there are people awake for exactly this, and reaching for them is not a failure of faith, it is the wisest thing you will do this year. Please do not sit alone with that one. Talking to God about it is good. It is not enough, and you deserve a person beside you.
Now, open your hands.
Declare this over yourself
Say it with your hands still open. You are allowed to speak like this because you are in Christ, and that standing was given to you in your strongest year and has not been withdrawn in your emptiest one. And say it with the outcome left where it belongs: God may answer this in His own way and in His timing, and a flat week after you say it is never a verdict on you.
- Emptiness, you are not the end of me. The Word of God says He gives power to the faint, and to them that have no might He increases strength, so having nothing is the qualification and not the disqualification. Get off this house, in the name of Jesus.
- Rest that has stopped touching this, you are not my source and you never were the thing holding me up. The One who does not faint and is not weary is holding me, and He has never once asked a depleted person to produce anything. My hands are open and there is nothing in them, and that is exactly the right position.
- Lord, You are the God who does not grow weary, and today I stop hunting for the bottom of my own strength. I am carried when I cannot carry, and Your strength is mine now, received and not manufactured. I thank You, because You give power to the faint, and this morning that is my address.
Isaiah 40:29-31
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