The Stop She Did Not Get Off At

The bus is warm and half full and smells of other people's breakfasts. She has the window seat on the left, the one she always takes, because from there she can see the chemist's sign that means her stop is next. Lanyard still on. Twelve hours behind her, four of them on her feet in one room with one man who did not want to be turned.

The chemist's sign goes past. Her hand goes up for the pole the way it has gone up a thousand mornings, and it does not close. It just rests there, open, against the cold metal, and the bus slows and the doors fold back and a boy with a school bag gets off and the doors fold shut, and she is still sitting down.

She could have said something. The driver would have waited. But saying something takes a thing she does not have, and standing takes another thing she does not have, and it turns out this morning she has neither. So the bus pulls away from her own stop with her on it, and she watches the chemist's sign get small, and she thinks the sentence everybody has said to her since she was fourteen. You're the strong one.

And this is you, isn't it. Not on a bus, maybe. But somewhere your hand went up for the thing it always reaches for and did not close, and you sat there while the doors shut, and you have been quietly deciding what that says about you. You have heard the verse. Somebody has told you, kindly, that when you have nothing left is exactly where He starts. And you would like to know how you are supposed to feel about that when you are still on the bus.

Nobody is going to tell you to be strong

Say the pit plainly. You have run out. Not low, not tired: out. And the sentence that has followed you since you were a girl has never once come with anything attached to it except more of your own weight. Be strong has meant stay useful. It has meant we need you upright. So when the hand did not close on the pole this morning, the first thing you felt was not rest. It was the verdict.

Here is where that sentence was first said, and what it came with. God said it to Joshua at the edge of a river he could not cross on his own: Be strong and courageous, do not be frightened, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go (Joshua 1:9). Read the second half. It is not an order to produce. It is an order that arrived with a presence attached to it. The strength being asked for was the strength of the One who would be standing in the water beside him, and it is the Spirit of that same God who stands beside you now.

Nobody in your life said the second half. So hear it now, in this seat.

You are not being told to be stronger, and you are not being measured by the hand that would not close. I am not saying that to be kind. It is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries the written thing into a bus at seven in the morning: God is with you wherever you go, including the stop after your stop. The exhaustion is not a faith problem. It is not a discipline problem. It is a woman who has been carrying a ward and a family and has finally, honestly, run out of the thing everybody assumed was bottomless.

Where the strength was always kept

Now the verse you keep being handed. Paul asked three times for a weakness to be taken away, and the answer he got is the one people put on mugs: My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). It is not a slogan and I am not going to use it as one. Look at the verb. Made perfect is a word for a thing brought to completion, finished, arriving at its full. His power comes to its full where yours ends. Not because weakness is good. Nobody is asking you to want more of it. Because the strength was His the whole time, and your own running out is simply the place where that stops being hidden.

There is an older line that says it without any argument at all. A man who had watched everything he trusted give way wrote this:

My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.Psalm 73:26

May fail. He does not soften it. The body gives out; the heart gives out; the hand does not close. And then, without a gap, without a therefore try harder, God is the strength of the heart. Not the heart's coach. Not the heart's example. Its strength. The thing it runs on.

You have a strength that is not yours, and it did not run out this morning when yours did. This is the written word and not mine, and His Spirit is the one who makes it more than a line you have read: He is in you, and the strength of your heart is a Person, and a Person does not deplete. What holds you for the next hour is His. You did not generate it. You are not asked to.

One hour, and only one

Everybody who ever told you to be strong wanted the whole road out of you. That is why the sentence exhausted you. God does not deal in the whole road. Manna came for a day, and the ones who gathered for the week found it spoiled. His strength is sized to the hour in front of you, and I mean that as the whole of the promise, not a smaller version of it. Not the shift tomorrow night. Not the family. Not the rest of the year. The next hour, which is you getting off at the next stop and walking back past the chemist's, and that is all the strength you are being handed here, and it is enough for that.

You are held for the next hour, and held is a different thing from holding. Scripture puts the weight where it belongs: the Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be silent (Exodus 14:14). Only be still. That is the entire job description at the edge of the sea. And the Holy Spirit does the fighting part, not you, not your posture, not the face you keep for the ward.

Notice what Jesus asked for when He asked for faith. A seed's worth. Not a harvest, not a field, a thing you could carry in a closed hand on a bus without noticing the weight. He said that much, spoken to a mountain, moves it (Matthew 17:20). Your mountain has a name and it is not the shift. It is the sentence: you're the strong one. It has sat on you for years and it does not get to ride home with you today.