Here Am I And Not Much Else

Four hours. Not four good hours in a row, which is what people picture. Four hours in total, arriving in pieces, and the pieces do not announce themselves in advance.

She has a system for them. Everybody in her position has a system and hers involves a paper list on the fridge and a rule about not spending a piece of the four on anything that could be done by somebody else.

And this morning, in the middle of one of the pieces, a thing arrived.

Not a voice. She is careful about how she describes it, even to herself, because she was raised by people who were careful. It was a thought with a weight on it, about something specific and somebody specific, and it did not go away when she made the tea, and it has not gone away since.

The trouble is the arithmetic. What has arrived is not a small thing. She can see the shape of it, and she can see roughly what carrying it would cost, and she has been doing this long enough to price things accurately.

It costs more than four hours.

The sentence arrived about ten minutes after the thought did, and it has been sitting on top of it since: whatever that was, it cannot have been for me, because I do not have what it would take.

You know that arithmetic. Something has been laid on you, or asked of you, or has simply refused to leave, and you have priced it against what you actually have and come up short by a distance that is not close.

What he said, and what he did not attach

There is a scene in Isaiah that every keen believer has read and most have felt slightly guilty about, and the guilt comes from a misreading.

Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me.Isaiah 6:8

Here am I, send me. People treat that as the high water mark of volunteering, and picture a man full of capacity offering it.

Look at what is actually there. Two words about himself: here am I. That is all he claims. He does not say I am able. He does not say I have the strength for whatever it is. He does not, at any point in that chapter, price the assignment and confirm that he can afford it.

And notice the verb he uses. Send me. The sending is somebody else's action. He is not proposing to go. He is asking to be sent, which is a completely different transaction.

You are somebody God sends rather than somebody who has to go under her own power, and the sending has never once been costed against your capacity. That is what the written word says over you and not a soft framing chosen for a woman with a list on a fridge, and the Holy Spirit who is in you this morning is the evidence that the arithmetic was never yours to complete.

Watch what that does to the pricing you did ten minutes after. If the sending is His action, then four hours in pieces is information about an illness with a name and a course. It is not the measure of what can be asked of you, and it never had the standing to become that.

What this page is not doing

Here is the second thing, and it needs saying because of how this kind of message usually goes.

Nothing here is telling you to say yes. Not to that thing, not to anything. Nothing here is suggesting that if you step out God will supply the hours, because that is a promise about your body that nobody on this page has any right to make, and people have been badly hurt by it.

And nothing here is telling you that trying harder would make you more faithful. Four hours is not a spiritual condition. It is a medical fact and it deserves to be treated as one, including by you.

What is here is smaller and much better founded: Isaiah did not offer capacity, and God did not ask for any.

You have been carried through every one of the days that come in pieces, and the carrying did not shrink to match the hours. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit at work in whatever that thing was rather than waiting to see whether you can afford it.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a warm thought and a list on a fridge. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a person has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Out loud. Not priced silently in a kitchen. And the thing in the way is not the illness. It is a sentence: it cannot have been for me. Nobody has ever answered that out loud, and you least of all.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a woman with any authority on a good hour of a bad day. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in what the four hours could cover.

If this has taken you somewhere darker than tiredness, and there are hours when you would rather not be here at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.