Nothing In The Tank At Midnight

The tea has been at Bernie's elbow so long it has a skin on it.

It is ten past twelve. The kitchen lamp is the only light on in the house. The faucet has the drip it has had since March, and on the door of the refrigerator there is a calendar with fourteen things written on it and not one of them is hers. Her daughter's scan. Her neighbor's cat while they are away. A parent teacher conference that is not hers.

The phone is face down on the tablecloth. When it goes, the screen throws a little rectangle of light onto the ceiling, and she has been watching that rectangle come and go since ten.

Three of them tonight. Val, whose mother has about a week and who has nobody else to say that to at this hour. Her sister, about her sister's husband, the same as the last four. And the young woman from work, twenty-three, who has just found out something about her boyfriend that has knocked her flat.

Every one of those is real. Not one is unreasonable. If any of the three called her right now she would say yes, because she has said yes since she was nineteen and she is fifty-three, and it is not a decision anymore, it is a reflex, like putting your hand out when you trip.

But there is nothing in her.

That is the part she cannot get anybody to understand, because it does not come with a feeling attached. She is not sad about it. She is not angry with any of them. There is no sensation in the place where the answer normally comes from, the way there is none in a foot you have been sitting on.

And underneath that sits the thing she has never said out loud to a single person: if it can go empty like this, maybe it was never real. Maybe thirty-four years of being the one people call was a performance she got extremely good at, and this is the night the performance ran out.

She does not answer any of them.

She puts her head down on her folded arms on the kitchen table, meaning to sit there for a minute, and she wakes at ten to four with the mark of her sleeve in her cheek and a crick in her neck until Wednesday.

There is a blanket over her shoulders.

Marvin came down at some point, saw her, put it over her and went back up. He does not mention it in the morning. He never mentions it. She sits up at ten to four in a dark kitchen under a blanket she did not put there, and she has no idea what to do with that either.

Read the two verses before the famous one

Everybody has the last verse of Isaiah 40 on something. A card, a magnet, a church hall wall. Almost nobody reads the two before it, and those two are the ones written for a kitchen at midnight.

He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall.Isaiah 40:29 and 30

Look at who is in that sentence, because it is not who you would expect.

The youths. The young men. The ones with the most in the tank, the ones you would pick if you were picking. They faint. They are weary. The verse does not say they might; it says they shall, and then it goes further and says utterly fall, which is not a graceful stumble.

That is not a warning about weak people. That is God saying, through Isaiah, that running out is what happens to human beings, including the strongest available, and that it is the normal condition of a creature and not a defect in a particular one.

You are one of the faint that verse was written for, and being faint is the qualification rather than the disqualification. Isaiah 40:29 says He gives power to the faint, and the written word puts the faint first in the sentence, before anybody has recovered anything. The Spirit is not standing in that kitchen waiting for you to perk up so the verse can apply.

And read the second clause slowly. To them that have no might He increaseth strength. Not to them that have a little left. Not to them who have been careful with it. To them that have none.

If you had some, the verse would have nothing to do.

You have no might tonight, and the written word treats that as the address on the envelope and never as the accusation inside it. Isaiah 40:29 is written to precisely that person, and His Spirit does not soften it into a general encouragement. He puts it on a specific table.

A lamp is not a battery

Here is where I think the damage got in, and it got in through kindness.

Somewhere along the line you were taught that you are a container. You get filled up on a Sunday, you spend it during the week, and if you are running low the remedy is more filling. It is meant well every time it is said. It is also the reason a woman at a kitchen table at midnight believes her emptiness is a report card.

But look at what a lamp is.

A battery holds its supply inside itself, and the entire logic of a battery is that it depletes. A lamp holds nothing. It carries. It is a shaped piece of glass and wire that a current passes through, and if a lamp goes out nobody in the history of the world has knelt down and asked the glass what it has been doing with its evenings.

Isaiah does not say that the ones who wait shall be topped up. He says God gives power to the faint and God increases strength where there is none, and every active verb in that sentence belongs to Him.

You are lit by a supply you do not store, and empty was never the same thing as unplugged. Isaiah 40:29 puts the giving and the increasing on God's side of the line without exception, and His Spirit is not the reward for keeping a little in reserve. He is the current, and He was the current on the good years too.

Now the other thing, and I will say it plainly.

Resting is not dimming. A woman asleep at a kitchen table at four in the morning under a blanket she did not put there is not in a spiritual condition. She is a tired person who fell asleep. Nothing about her standing moved while she was unconscious, and nothing about her light went down, because it was never running off her alertness in the first place.

And I am not going to promise you that the feeling comes back by a particular week. I do not know. Nobody honest does. What I can tell you is what has been written down, which is not a schedule and is much better than one.

You were never the source, and that arrangement has not changed once since the night you first noticed it was missing. The written word gives the power and the increase to God from beginning to end of that passage. What the Spirit adds is that this is being said about you at your own table and not about believers in general.