The Plate That Went Cold Again

The thing that finally got him was not the phone call. It was that nobody looked up.

Eleven years ago, when the phone went during dinner, four heads came up at once and the whole table stopped. His youngest used to put her fork down and wait. There was a silence in the room while he took it, and when he came back there was a question, and the question was always some version of, is everything all right with them.

Now it goes and nothing happens. He stands up, and the conversation carries on around the space where he was, seamlessly, the way water closes over a stone. Somebody passes the rice past his empty chair. Somebody makes a joke. His daughter, who was six when this started and is not six now, has learned to time it so she tells the good part of her story while he is out of the room, because otherwise she has to tell it twice and she has stopped wanting to tell things twice.

He came back in on a Tuesday in the spring and stood in the doorway for a second before he sat down, and looked at his own place at his own table.

Everyone else was on the last of theirs. His was untouched and it had gone that particular gray that food goes. There was a skin on the sauce. And in the eleven minutes he had been in the hall, his family had had a whole evening without him in it, and had had it happily, because they love each other and they are good company and they have had a lot of practice.

He put the plate in the microwave. He has an extremely efficient system for this. Ninety seconds, stir, sixty more.

And standing there watching the plate go round, he thought a thought he had been keeping away from for about three years, which was: they are fine. They are completely fine. The arrangement works. And the only person in this house that this arrangement is quietly finishing off is the one who set it up.

Read who the strength is issued to

Isaiah 40 ends with the verse everybody has on a card and almost nobody reads the two verses before it.

He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength.Isaiah 40:29

Look at who is on the receiving end of that sentence. Not the willing. Not the disciplined. The faint, and the ones with no might, which is a Hebrew way of saying the ones who have nothing left in the tank at all.

Then look at what comes next. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall. The strongest category of person that culture had a word for is listed as falling over. That is not there to shame them. It is there so that nobody reading it can conclude that fainting is a category error, or that it happens only to the ones who did it wrong.

So hear this over you, standing at a microwave at nine at night. You are not failing at this. You are faint, which is a word God uses about people He is actively strengthening, and Isaiah 40 puts the power and the faintness in the same sentence on purpose, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph that carries a line like that into a man who has been calling himself something worse for three years.

Now watch what that does to the arrangement.

If strength is a reserve you draw down, then a cold plate is the honest cost of a calling and eleven years of it is simply the bill. That is how it has felt. But Isaiah says strength is not drawn down, it is issued, and it is issued specifically to the empty. Which means the emptiness you have been hiding is not the disqualification. It is the address on the envelope.

There is something that happens to a man over eleven years of this and it is worth saying out loud. The family adapts, because families are astonishing and they adapt to anything. And then the adaptation gets read as permission. Nobody minds, so nothing is wrong. They are fine, so I am fine.

But they adapted to an absence. That is what they got good at. And the fact that they carried it beautifully is a fact about them, and it was never evidence about what it was costing you.

You are allowed to feel the cost of something your family bore well. That is not ingratitude and it is not self pity. His word never once treats a borne burden as a burden that did not happen, and the Holy Spirit is not in the business of talking a tired man out of the truth about his own eleven years.

And here is the thing I most want you to have tonight. The strength that is being handed to you now is not being handed to you so you can go and be more available. That is the reflex, and I am cutting it off before it starts. There is no instruction in this message. He gives power to the faint because they are faint, full stop, and there is no clause after it about output. You are being restored, not resupplied.

You are held tonight. Not once the phone stops going. Now, at the microwave, at ninety seconds, with a plate going round, because His word says He increaseth strength to them that have no might and it does not add a single condition, and the Holy Spirit is doing the increasing in a kitchen while nobody is looking.

Let me say one thing plainly before we go on, because this message is written to a person running on nothing. If the tiredness has gone somewhere darker lately, if there have been thoughts in that hall with the phone in your hand that you would not repeat to anybody, please do not carry that alone tonight. In the United States you can call or text 988. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one real human being who can sit with you before you sleep. That is not weakness in a calling. That is exactly what Isaiah 40 is describing, and God is the one who wrote the verse.