Strength for the Road, Not the Man

The trunk light is the only light left on the street, and he has been standing in it for eleven minutes with the last bag still on the ground by his foot.

Everything else is in. The two cases. The box his daughter asked for. The folding chair that would not lie flat and went in at an angle in the end, the way it always does. The flask is on the kitchen counter waiting for five in the morning. The route is written out on a piece of paper on the passenger seat, because he does not trust the phone through the hills and he never has. He has done this properly, the way he does everything, and the only thing standing between him and finished is one soft bag with a shirt and a wash kit in it, and he cannot make his arm reach down for it.

It is not the bag. He could lift the car.

It is that while he was folding the chair the arithmetic started up in him, and the arithmetic is still running. Alarm at five. On the road by twenty past. Three hundred and forty miles with two stops if the traffic is kind. Then the afternoon at the other end, which is the actual reason for the journey and the part he has not let himself look at directly since Tuesday. Then a night on a sofa bed. Then three hundred and forty miles back on Sunday, and work on Monday at eight, and a fortnight after that with two things already in it that cannot be moved.

And he has nothing.

That is the plain fact of him at ten past ten under a trunk light. Not tired the way a man is tired after a good day and a long one. Emptied, some while ago, and running since on something he could not have named even when it was there. He went looking for it tonight while he was packing. He patted the place where it used to be, the way you pat a pocket at a ticket barrier, and the pocket was flat.

He is not frightened of the drive. He is frightened of the eleven minutes, because if a man cannot pick up a soft bag at ten past ten, then what exactly is supposed to happen at five, and what happens at two in the afternoon at the other end when the room turns to him and waits for him to be the one who knows what to say.

He picks it up eventually. He puts it in and closes the lid and the street goes dark, and he stands in the dark a moment longer with his hand still flat on the metal, and the sentence he carries into the house is the one nobody says out loud. I do not have what tomorrow needs, and everybody is expecting me anyway.

You know that pocket. It may not be a car and it may not be a Saturday, but you know what it is to go looking for the thing you have always run on and find the place empty. I am not going to tell you to find more. I want to tell you where the strength for tomorrow actually is, because I do not think it is where you have been looking.

The strength was never in the man

I read old texts for a living, and there is a line in the Psalms that well meaning people get wrong, not in the words but in the emphasis. It sits inside a pilgrim song, written for people on a road.

Blessed are those whose strength is in you, in whose heart are the highways to Zion.Psalm 84:5

Read where the strength is. It is not in the man and being topped up by God. It is in Him, and the man is the one it belongs to. The Hebrew behind that phrase runs closer to whose strong place is in You, the way you would speak of a stronghold or a fortress, a thing you go into rather than a thing you carry. Nobody carries a fortress. That is rather the point of a fortress.

And notice what is in the man's heart instead. Highways. Roads. Not power, not capacity, not a reserve tank. The pilgrim's inside is full of the way, the strength is in God, and those two facts sit in one sentence without any tension between them at all.

You are a man with an empty pocket and a full covering, and the two are not in competition. I am not softening the pocket. What is written in Psalm 84:5 puts the strength somewhere other than in you on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line composed for people walking to a feast and lays it under a man at ten past ten with his hand on a trunk lid.

Something got done to that verse on its way to you. It became a slogan handed to tired people as though it were an instruction. It is not one. It is a location. It tells you where the strength is kept, and the answer is that it is kept in Him, which means the flat pocket you found tonight is not a symptom of anything. It is the ordinary condition of a man whose strength is stored somewhere other than in himself.

You have a strength tonight that is not yours, and it was never meant to be yours. That is not a consolation prize and I am not dressing up an absence. It is what the written word says about where strength lives, and it is His Spirit who turns a location into a floor under a person instead of a pleasant thought about a psalm.

They go from strength to strength

Two verses on, the same song says something that people quote and almost nobody reads.

They go from strength to strength. Look at the shape of it. Not: they were given strength at the start and made it last. They go from strength to strength, which is the grammar of a supplied road, a thing handed out again at each stage to people who keep arriving at each stage without it.

And the verse just before it is about a valley. The pilgrims pass through a dry place, the Valley of Baca, the valley of weeping, and the song says they make it a place of springs. Nobody in that psalm is carrying what they need. Everybody in it is receiving it where they are standing.

So here is what I want to say to a man at a trunk lid. Tonight you are not supposed to feel able for tomorrow. Not because you are failing at something, and not because there is a discipline you have missed. It is that tomorrow's supply is not issued tonight. You are given the next stage, and only the next stage, and that is not God being careful with you. Psalm 84 has it written into its own grammar, from strength to strength, and the Spirit does not deliver Saturday's portion to a man on Friday night, because a man cannot hold it and was never built to.

I want to be plain about the size of this, because tonight a large promise is not a kindness. I am not telling you that you have strength for the whole road. I am telling you that the alarm at five has a strength attached to it, that it is His, and that it arrives at five and not before. Sunday's drive home is not your business tonight and I would not have you touch it.

You were never asked to arrive at five o'clock already full. That is not my opinion about you; it is what the written word describes when it puts the strength in Him and the highways in the heart, and the Holy Spirit is the One who hands out a portion at a stage rather than a stockpile at a starting line.