Everybody Calls Me Strong

The prayer line closes at ten past one, and the last woman in it is holding your sleeve.

She has been crying about her son for twenty minutes and you have not moved an inch. You know how to do this. You put your hand flat between her shoulder blades and you keep it there until the shaking stops, and you speak over that boy by name, and you do not let go until she says amen like she means it.

Nine years you have done this. The pastor says the anointing is on you for it, and he is not wrong.

Now they are stacking the offering buckets and the sound man is coiling cable and somebody's toddler is running the length of the sanctuary in socks. You pick up your Bible and your keys and you say good night to four people and you go out to your car.

And you sit down in the driver's seat and put the keys in your lap and do not start the engine.

Because it happened again today. Sister Marlene said you are so strong, you know that. Your cousin said it at the funeral in March. Your own mother said it about you to somebody at the door once, and you were seven, and you have been being it ever since.

Not one of them has ever stood you up in front of them and said something good over your life. Nine years of hands on other people's backs and nobody has ever laid one on yours.

A man held on and said it out loud

I want to sit in this car with you a minute before I say one word of teaching, because I know what one ten at night feels like and I am not going to rush you out of it.

Let me clear the floor first, because Scripture will not let me start anywhere else and the Spirit will not let me start unkindly. Nobody in that building is guilty tonight. They are not withholding anything. Strong is what they call the person who never asks, and you have never once asked, and they have taken your not asking as evidence that you do not need it. That is not cruelty. That is what happens when somebody is very good at carrying for nine years. The absence is real, and an absence is not a verdict, and I am not about to hand you a grievance against people you love.

Now come with me to a riverbank at night, because there is a man there who is going to teach you something.

And he said, Let me go, for the day breaketh. And he said, I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.Genesis 32:26

Jacob. Alone, in the dark, at the ford of the Jabbok, wrestling until sunrise, and what he says is not fix my brother and not keep me alive tomorrow. He says bless me. Out loud. He asks for the thing directly, and he does not apologize for asking, and God does not rebuke him for it. God blesses him and gives him a new name before the sun comes up.

You have the same standing at this riverbank tonight, and it is not greed and it never was. That is not me being generous with a tired woman. That is the written account of what a man asked for and what God did about it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it in the front seat of a car in a church parking lot.

Here is what nobody explains at these prayer lines. When you lay hands on somebody, you are not manufacturing anything. You are agreeing out loud with something God has already said about them. Your hands are a door. God is the one coming through. And if the power sat in the hands, then a woman whose people never lifted theirs would be an unblessed woman, and God has never written a rule that mean.

The blessing you have poured out all night was never yours to run dry of, and it was never yours to be locked out of. Scripture says God has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing, past tense, sealed (Ephesians 1:3), and the Spirit is the one who takes a settled thing in heaven and warms it into a woman sitting with her keys in her lap.

What nine years of carrying actually proves

Now let me take something off you, and I want you braced, because this one has been sitting on you a long time and you have been calling it faithfulness. What is written will lift it, and the Spirit is the one who does the lifting.

You decided somewhere back there that strong is what you are for. That the reason nobody blesses you is that you are the one who does the blessing, and that wanting it said over you would be a kind of weakness that disqualifies you from the very thing you are good at. So you stopped wanting it. You did not stop needing it.

That is not faithfulness. That is a woman handing down a ruling on herself in an empty parking lot, and what is written never once entered that ruling against you. The Spirit is here to say so out loud.

God has known your name since before that church had a foundation, and He has never once confused you with the job you do in it. It is written that He knew you before He formed you (Jeremiah 1:5), and the same Spirit who breathed that sentence is holding it up in front of your windshield right now, which is why it lands like testimony instead of encouragement.

Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you that being the strong one is secretly a blessing so you will feel better about the drive home. It is one ten in the morning and you are alone in a car and I am not going to paint that. What I am telling you is that the blessing was never wired to come through Sister Marlene, so the fact that it did not come that way is no proof at all that it did not come.

You are not the exception to what you have been preaching over everybody else for nine years. Scripture says the promise is to you and to your children and to all that are afar off (Acts 2:39), and the Spirit who wrote that word you into the sentence has been waiting in this car for you to hear it aimed at your own head.