The One Who Always Shows Up

Her name is the one on the list, and there is no list, which is how you know it is real.

Somebody goes into hospital and within about four hours she knows, and within a day she has been. If there is a death she is at the house before the family has worked out who needs telling. She has driven three different women to three different funerals of their own mothers in eighteen months.

She is fifty seven. She has done this since she was thirty one.

Nobody appointed her and nobody has ever thanked her in a way that would embarrass her, which is right, and there is a bag in the boot of her car with the things you need, and she restocks it without thinking about it.

Here is what has changed and what she has told nobody.

She arrives empty now. Not tired, which she has always been. Empty, which is different, and it started about a year ago and it has got steadier. She does the same things. She says the same things and they are still true. And there is nothing behind them, and she can feel that there is nothing behind them, while she is doing it.

She sat in a car outside a house in the spring for eleven minutes before going in, and that had never happened before in twenty six years.

She cannot say this to anybody at that church because of what she is to them, and because saying it sounds like asking for something, and she has never asked for anything.

Sit down in the car with the engine off. There is a verse about who gets given strength and it is not the strong.

He gives power to the faint

Here it is, and the qualification named in it is not what people assume.

He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength.Isaiah 40:29

To the faint. To him who has no might. That is the condition, and it is stated twice in one verse, and it is not a description of somebody who is coping.

That is the eligibility for what is on offer. Not endurance. Not a good record. Not twenty six years of showing up. The verse gives strength to the person who has run out, and if you have not run out then this particular sentence is not addressed to you.

You are inside the qualification rather than outside it. Isaiah 40:29 names the faint and the person with no might as the ones who receive, and the Spirit inspired it in that direction rather than the one everybody assumes.

And look at what comes just before it in that chapter, because it is a description of God rather than of a duty: He does not faint or grow weary, and His understanding is unsearchable. The contrast is deliberate. He does not run out. You do. That is not a defect in you, it is the arrangement.

Empty is a reading, not a failure

Now the year, because it has been getting treated as a moral condition.

Arriving empty is not the same as arriving false. Everything you say in those houses is still true and the things you do are still the right things, and a person running on nothing is not a hypocrite, they are a person running on nothing.

What has actually happened is entirely predictable and it has happened to everybody who has done what you have done for twenty six years without ever being on the receiving end of it. There is no version of that arrangement that does not eventually produce this. Nothing written anywhere required it of you, and the Spirit is not the one who set it up that way.

And the eleven minutes in the car were not a warning about your character. They were a reading on an instrument, and instruments are supposed to be read.

You are not disqualified by an empty tank. Nothing written anywhere makes a full one the condition of being useful, and the Spirit gives to the one who has no might rather than to the one who has managed.

Being on the other side of it

Here is the practical part, and it will be harder for you than anything in the houses.

You need one person who does for you what you do for everybody. Not the church. One person, probably not from that congregation, who is allowed to ask you how you actually are and to whom you have to answer honestly.

That is not a program and it is not a confession. It is one arrangement with one human being, and it is the thing that everybody in your position does not have and needs, and the absence of it is why people like you eventually stop suddenly rather than gradually.

And say the sentence out loud to somebody. I arrive empty now. Four words. You have not said them in a year.

You are permitted to be ministered to. What is written puts the receiving before the giving and the Spirit distributes across a church so that no one woman has to be the well.

Then keep going, or stop for a season, and either of those is a legitimate answer. What is not legitimate is another year alone with it.

And if a season off is what it turns out to be, that church will survive it, which is a sentence you will resist and should sit with anyway. Somebody else will be first at the hospital, badly at first, and that is how anybody learns. Twenty six years of one woman doing all of it has almost certainly prevented four other people from ever discovering they could.