Made Perfect In The Place You Hate

Six forty in the morning, and she is awake, and she feels almost all right, and that is the trap. Almost all right at six forty says nothing whatsoever about eleven.

So she does the arithmetic before her feet touch the floor, the way she has done it every morning for six years. Four hours, give or take twenty minutes. That is what there is. Now what goes in it. The pharmacy call has to go in it, because they close for lunch. The laundry has to go in it or it will sit wet in the machine until tomorrow and have to be done twice. If the laundry goes in, the other thing does not.

She has become extremely good at this. She could run a small country on four hours if the country would only stop wanting things after eleven.

At ten fifty her arms go heavy. It comes on like sand being poured in at the shoulders, and it is not tiredness, and she gave up explaining the difference to people a long time ago. By eleven fifteen she is lying on top of the bed with her shoes still on, watching the ceiling do its slow thing, and there are another eleven hours of daylight out there that have nothing to do with her.

And what arrives, lying there, is not despair. It is far too flat for that. It is one plain sentence with no drama in it at all: if I went tomorrow, I honestly do not think anybody would be short of anything.

You know that sentence. And you know it does not feel like self-pity when it comes, which is exactly what makes it so hard to argue with. It feels like accuracy.

In, not despite

Paul asked three times.

Hold on to that, because we skate over it. Whatever the thing was, and he never tells us, he wanted it gone and he asked God to take it away, and then he asked again, and then he asked a third time. This is a man who had seen prison doors open and a dead boy get up off a floor. If anybody in that century had grounds to expect a yes, it was him.

He got a no. And then he got a sentence that he clearly never forgot, because he wrote it down word for word years later.

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

Read the small word in the middle and do not go past it. In weakness.

Not despite weakness, which is what people usually hear, and which would mean the weakness is an obstacle God is generously working around. Not after weakness, which would mean it is a phase with an exit. In. It is a location word. Paul is being told that the strength of God comes to its full working inside the very thing he has been asking to have removed.

Which means the four hours are not the fence around your usefulness. Eleven fifteen, with your shoes on, staring at the ceiling, is not the point at which you stop counting. It is the address.

You are lying in the exact place where the strength of God is brought to its full working, and it is the place you hate. 2 Corinthians 12:9 puts it in weakness rather than after it, in writing, with no exemption clause attached, and His Spirit does not wait for eleven o'clock to pass before He does anything.

And look at what Paul says he wants out of it. He wants the power of Christ to come and settle over him, to tent over him the way a covering goes over the thing it protects. He is not describing a man who got his strength back. He is describing a man with something pitched over the weak place.

I am not going to give you a job

Now let me be direct about what this article is not going to do to you.

I am not going to suggest a role. I am not going to hand you something small and manageable that you could probably do if you paced yourself, and I am not going to name a thing you could take on that would prove you are not surplus. You have read that article. It has been written at you a hundred times, always kindly, and every single time it has quietly told you that your part in this depends on output, which is precisely the arithmetic you were already doing at six forty in the morning.

Here is the other way of counting, and it is the one Scripture actually uses.

Paul writes elsewhere about the body and its parts, and he goes out of his way to deal with exactly this. The parts that look weaker, he says, the ones that seem more feeble, are necessary. Necessary is not a soft word. It does not mean welcome, or valued, or lovely to have around. It means the thing does not work without them. He also says that the distributing of what each member carries is done by the Spirit as He decides, not as anybody's strength allows, and that the body itself does the arranging of who goes where, and none of it was ever put to a vote of the strong.

You have something the rest of them need, and it is not decorative. Scripture calls the feeble-seeming members necessary, which is written down rather than said to be nice, and the Spirit divides to each one as He wills rather than as anybody's energy permits.

There is also the plain matter of what actually gets given in this world. A sentence prayed at eleven fifteen from a bed is not a smaller offering than four hours of anything. God has never once run a schedule. The widow put in two small coins and the accounting on that day went the other way from what everybody in the room assumed, and nobody has ever suggested she should have waited until she could afford more.

You are not the spare person at the edge of this, and you never have been. He promised sufficiency, and He put it in writing, and His Spirit brings it at eleven fifteen exactly as readily as at seven in the morning.