The Steady One

Warren Boyd has a pegboard over his workbench with the outline of every tool drawn on it in black marker, so anybody can see at a glance what is missing and where it goes. He did that eighteen years ago and he has never regretted it.

It is twenty to ten on a Thursday. The garage door is up because the evening is warm. There is a legal pad on the bench, and on the legal pad, in Warren's handwriting, is a list that is not his.

Patty's water heater, call Dell in the morning. Church van, front left, Saturday. Ask about Teddy's job thing. Rich's mower, needs the coil.

That is the whole page and none of it is his own life. It has been like this so long that he no longer notices it is remarkable, the way a man stops hearing a highway he lives beside.

He is the one everybody calls. He has been the one everybody calls since his father died and he was twenty six and somebody had to be, and he stepped into it the way you step into cold water, all at once, and then it was just the temperature.

His sister in law calls him. His daughter's husband calls him. Rich next door calls him and Rich is sixty one and perfectly capable, but Warren knows the coil on that mower and Rich does not, and it takes twenty minutes.

None of this is a complaint. Ask Warren and he will tell you he is fine, that he likes being useful, that a man ought to be good for something. All of that is true and he means every word.

Here is the part he could not tell you, because he has never once put words to it.

He cannot remember the last time anything came into him.

Not encouragement. He gets plenty of that. People thank him constantly. He cannot remember the last time something ran through him that he did not first manufacture out of his own effort, standing in this garage, deciding to.

He is not burned out in the dramatic way. He is not lying on the floor. He gets up, he does the list, the list is done, he makes a new list. If you asked him where the strength comes from he would look at the pegboard and say, well, you just do it.

And that answer has worked for twenty two years.

He picks up the mower coil, turns it over, sets it down. The clip lamp on the shelf makes a warm circle on the bench and the rest of the garage stays dark, and out past the driveway the crickets are going.

Warren stands there a minute longer than the job requires and does not know why.

Sufficient is a word about a supply

Paul had something wrong with him. He calls it a thorn in the flesh and never says what it was, which has kept commentators busy for two thousand years and does not matter in the slightest for our purposes.

What matters is that he asked God to take it away three times. Three times. A man who had planted churches across the empire, who had been shipwrecked and beaten and left for dead, asked plainly and repeatedly for one thing to be removed, and the answer came back no.

And then the sentence. My grace is sufficient for thee.

Now sit with what kind of a word sufficient actually is. It is not a compliment. It is not a word about Paul at all. It is a word about a supply, the way you would say the tank is sufficient for the trip. It describes the size of what is available. It says nothing whatsoever about the strength of the man drawing on it.

You are running on a supply, and the written word says it is sufficient without ever once making that a statement about your capacity. I am not encouraging you. 2 Corinthians 12:9 is the answer God gave a man who had asked three times, recorded exactly as He said it, and the Holy Spirit does not soften it on the way to a garage. He delivers it whole.

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

Then read the second half, because the second half is the part that would offend Warren if he let it land.

My strength is made perfect in weakness. The word behind made perfect means brought to its completion, carried all the way to its purpose. So the weakness is not the interruption of the supply. The weakness is the room the supply was always going to fill.

Which turns the whole thing around. That tiredness at twenty to ten with the coil in his hand is not a fault report. It is not evidence that the steady one is finally failing. It is the exact condition the verse is written about, and the verse is not disappointed by it.

You were never disqualified by an empty stretch, because Scripture puts the emptiness inside the mechanism and not outside it. That is written plainly in the same verse and it does not have to be argued into shape. What the Spirit does here is keep a sentence about weakness from arriving in a tired man's ear as an accusation.

Nobody asked the clay to be bronze

There is a line two chapters earlier in the same letter, and it is the most practical sentence in the New Testament about being the one people lean on.

Paul says we have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that the excellency of the power may be of God and not of us. Earthen. A clay pot. Fired dirt. The cheapest container in the ancient world, the one you would not think twice about replacing.

And the reason given for the clay is not that clay is all God could find. The reason given is so that when the power shows up, nobody in the room mistakes where it came from.

Warren's mistake, and it is such a common one that it barely counts as a mistake, is that somewhere in twenty two years he quietly took over as the source. Not on purpose. Nobody decides that. It happens by drift, one call at a time, until the man who was carrying the supply starts to believe he is the supply, and then every low evening reads as a manufacturing defect.

You are the vessel and you were always the vessel, and being made of clay is not a shortcoming that came up recently. 2 Corinthians 4:7 says the treasure sits in an earthen container on purpose, and the purpose is stated in the verse itself. The same Spirit who inspired that line is not looking for a stronger pot before He fills this one.

Now let me say one thing carefully, because this is where these articles usually go wrong.

There is nothing here about topping you up. Nobody is promising that a feeling is going to come back, or that Thursday evenings are going to start feeling different, or that if you do a certain thing the tank reads full by the fall. That is not what the verse says and I am not going to put words in it.

What the verse says is that the supply is sufficient and its source is not you. That is a fact about right now, on an evening that may go on feeling exactly the way it feels.

And while we are here: the rest you have not been taking is not a dimming. A lamp that is turned low is still a lamp, and a man who sits down is not going out. Scripture has never once treated a tired servant as a diminished one.

You have a source that is not the pegboard and not the legal pad and not the twenty two years, and it was carrying you through all three. 2 Corinthians 12:9 puts the strength in Christ's hands and the weakness in yours and calls that arrangement finished. The Spirit is the One who makes an old letter to a worn out apostle land on a workbench at twenty to ten.