She keeps a small list of what she would need to have before she could turn, and she has never got any of it.
It is not written down. If you asked she would be surprised to hear she has a list at all. But it operates, and it goes something like this. She would need a stretch of decent sleep. She would need the situation at work to settle, because you cannot do a thing like this in the middle of a crisis. She would need to be past the current run of hard weeks, so that she could bring something rather than arriving in bits.
She has been waiting for those three conditions for two years and they have never once been simultaneously true.
And here is the shape of the trap, which I want to describe rather than argue with. The conditions she is waiting for are conditions of having something in reserve. And the reason she wants a reserve is that she believes turning to God is an undertaking, and undertakings require resources, and it would be somehow indecent to arrive at one with nothing.
So a tired woman waits until she is less tired to do the one thing that would rest her.
Let me sit with that for a moment rather than hurrying past it, because it is not a silly mistake and it is not a small cost. Two years is a long time to be nearly ready. And underneath it is something older: a sense that arriving empty at anybody's door, God's included, is a kind of imposition. Somebody taught her that, probably without words, a long time before any of this.
That is you with your list.
You're waiting to have something before you come. Sleep, or a settled month, or a bit of margin. And every one of the things you are waiting for is a form of having, and you have never once had them all at the same time, and you have concluded that this is a timing problem rather than a false requirement.
He asked three times and got an answer about emptiness
Paul has something he wants removed and he asks God to take it away three times, which is worth noticing on its own: this is a man who did not get what he asked for. And here is the answer he did get.
And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.2 Corinthians 12:9
My grace is sufficient for thee. Sufficient. Enough. Not enough once you have topped yourself up. Enough for the person as they currently are, which in Paul's case was a man in a condition he had asked three times to be released from. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that sufficiency arrive rather than the state of the one receiving it.
And then the second clause, which turns the whole arrangement over. My strength is made perfect in weakness. Made perfect means brought to completion, brought to its full working. So weakness is not the obstacle strength has to overcome before it can operate. It is the condition in which strength comes to its full expression.
You are being told that the empty tank is where the strength completes itself, rather than the reason it cannot start, and I am not being kind at Scripture's expense: 2 Corinthians 12:9 says made perfect in weakness, in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my gentleness who can carry it to a woman with an unwritten list.
Now hold that against what you have been waiting for. You have been waiting to have a reserve. The verse says the reserve was never the entry condition, and that the state you keep apologizing for is the state the whole thing is designed to work in.
You have nothing to bring and that is not a delay, it is the described condition, which is written into the second clause rather than into my sympathy for two hard years, with the Spirit of God able to reach a place that reasoning has only made more tiring.
I want to move slowly here, because a person who has been holding on for two years does not need a brisk correction. The instinct behind your list is not greed and it is not pride. It is a desire not to be a burden, and it usually comes from somewhere real. But God is not a household you can arrive at empty handed and shame. He is the one place where arriving with nothing is not a failure of manners; it is the whole design.
This is sufficient for you tonight, at whatever level the tank is actually at, because Scripture says sufficient and then explains why, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that to a doorway in the early evening.
Come empty.
Not as a last resort. Not as the version of this you settle for on a bad night. Empty is the condition 2 Corinthians 12:9 describes, and the strength reaches its full working precisely there, which means the tank you have been waiting to fill was never the requirement. The Holy Spirit is the one who carries that in.
Your list is real and every item on it is understandable. And not one of them appears anywhere in what God said to a man who asked three times and did not get what he wanted.
You are sufficient for tonight because His grace is, and the emptiness is where that grace does its most complete work, because 2 Corinthians 12:9 puts sufficiency and weakness in the same breath, and the Holy Spirit is the one making that a doorway you can walk through rather than a verse you find lovely.
Stop at the light. The kettle goes on before anything is said.
Declare this over yourself
Say them out loud, in whatever voice this evening has left you, and an exhausted one is welcome. The standing to say them is not something you work up to and it is not on loan from a rested week: Christ is in you, and the authority in these words belongs to Him and has been given to you in Scripture, made living by the Holy Spirit rather than by what you have left to spend. Jesus put the faith required at a mustard seed, which is His way of setting it under the line where anybody would trouble to measure, and then He said the part that carries: speak to the mountain. The mountain here is not the tiredness. It is the list. Speak to that. What He does with everything else He does in His own way, and the step is yours to take this evening.
- Reserve I am waiting to build, you are not the requirement, and in the name of Jesus I come empty. Scripture says His grace is sufficient, and sufficient is a word that describes what is already there rather than what I still have to raise.
- Fear of arriving at anybody's door with nothing, you have kept me two years from the one place where empty hands are the design. Scripture says His strength is made perfect in weakness, so the state I keep apologizing for is the state it works best in.
- Lord God, You answered a man who asked three times by telling him what You do in the empty place, and I am standing one step further on than I was a minute ago with nothing in my hands. I thank You, because Your Holy Spirit did the drawing and Your grace was already sufficient, and I am received empty and not at the end of a month I was never going to get.
2 Corinthians 12:9
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