Nothing In The Cupboard And Nothing In Me

Ten past six and the kitchen is still mostly dark, the window going from gray to a thin, cold gold along the top of the fence. Nadia is standing in front of the open cupboard with her hand on the door.

She got up first because she always gets up first. That is not a virtue, it is a mechanism, and it has been running since about 2014.

There is half a box of crackers in there. A jar of the seedy mustard nobody eats. The good tea, at the back, that she has been saving for an occasion that has not so far occurred. She is not hungry and she was never going to eat any of it. She is standing here because standing here is easier than the next thing, and the next thing is her phone.

There are three messages on it already, all from before six.

One from her sister, which will be about the calendar. One from the group about Saturday, which will need an answer today. And one that says only, call me when you can, from somebody who has said exactly that eleven times this year and who is not, in fairness, doing anything wrong.

Nadia looks at the three of them and feels nothing at all.

That is the frightening part. Not sadness. Not resentment. Nothing. Somebody has come in overnight and taken all the furniture out of the room and left the room. She reads the words call me when you can and they land on a surface with no give in it whatsoever.

And then, right on time, the shame.

Because she is the one people call. She has been that for eleven years. She is the one who turns up with a casserole and the right question, the one who sat in the parking lot outside the hospital for four hours with somebody who needed a person in a parking lot. That is not vanity. It is simply what she is, and everyone knows it, and she has never once minded.

So what is this. What is a person like her doing standing at a cupboard at ten past six with nothing in her, when other people have real trouble and she has, by any reasonable measure, an ordinary Tuesday. She has no right to this. That is the sentence, and it arrives in her own voice, and it is very quiet and completely convincing.

The light comes up along the fence. She is still standing there with her hand on the cupboard door.

You have a counter of your own and an hour of your own. You have been the strong one so long that the role has grown into your skin, and this morning there is nothing behind it, and the worst part is not the emptiness. It is that you are ashamed of being the one in trouble.

There Is A Verse Where Empty Is The Qualification

I am not going to try to fill you up. That is not what this is and it would not work anyway. What I am going to do is show you one sentence, and then get out of the way of it.

You are being met this morning with nothing whatsoever required of you. The Spirit has been in that kitchen since before the light was, and Isaiah 40:29 says in plain words what He came in there to do.

He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength.Isaiah 40:29

Read who it is addressed to. Not the willing. Not the ones who are nearly there. The faint, which is a word for somebody who has gone past tired into a place where the body simply will not, and the one who has no might, which is not a modest amount of might but none, zero, an empty cupboard.

You have the exact qualification that sentence is asking for. Isaiah 40:29 named the entry requirement and the entry requirement is having nothing, and the Spirit is not standing outside waiting for you to look a bit better first.

This is worth sitting with, because most of us learned the opposite so early we cannot remember learning it. We learned that God helps you when you are trying. That the supply arrives when you have made a start. That there is some minimum contribution, some show of willing, some scrap of effort you have to put on the table before Heaven engages. And so a person with an actually empty morning concludes, quite logically, that they have fallen below the threshold.

There is no threshold. The verse goes the other way. Having nothing is not what disqualifies you from that sentence. It is what the sentence is for.

You were received long before you had anything to bring. No encouragement of mine could reach that far. Scripture does, and His Spirit does.

The Shame Is The Heaviest Thing In The Room

Now the part that is actually crushing you, which is not the emptiness.

It is that you have a rule about who is allowed to be in trouble, and you are not on the list. Other people are allowed. You have told other people, warmly and sincerely and dozens of times, that they do not have to hold it together for you. You meant every word. You would say it again today. And it has never once occurred to you that the sentence might be available in your direction.

You are held here empty, and empty was never a disqualification. You are not taking my word for that. His word says He gives power to the faint, and the same Spirit who put the word faint into that line is standing where you are standing at ten past six.

I want to name the specific lie, because it works better in the dark. The lie says that your value was in the carrying. That you are the one who copes, and that if the coping stops, so does the reason anyone comes near you. It is such a quiet lie that it does not even feel like a thought. It feels like a fact about the world.

And here is the thing about Isaiah 40. Look at who it was written to. Not to heroes. It was written to a worn out, defeated, dislocated people who had nothing left to offer God at all, and the whole chapter is God describing Himself at length to people with empty hands. He does not ask them for a plan. He does not tell them to rally. He tells them who He is, and then He says He gives power to the faint.

You have been carried by God on every single day you thought you were carrying everyone. That is Scripture, not comfort, and the Holy Spirit is what makes it hold at six in the morning in a dark kitchen.