Power Turned Out to Be Staying

She has always known what power looks like and she has never once had any.

The picture came from somewhere in childhood and she has never examined it. It is loud. It moves fast. It walks into a room and the room changes, and people afterward say something about what happened.

She is not that and she never has been. She is the one who goes home at nine.

She has asked to be filled, more than once, properly, and she would tell you that she meant it every time. And nothing loud has ever arrived and nothing fast, and she has held that quietly against herself for about fifteen years.

Here is what has actually been happening, which she has never once counted.

She stays.

At her father's bedside in the last four days, when the two people who were louder than her both had reasons to be elsewhere for parts of it. At a table with a woman from work whose marriage was coming apart, for three hours, on an evening when there was nowhere the conversation could go. In a corridor with a friend after a scan, saying nothing whatever, for a very long time.

Every one of those was a room she wanted to leave, in a specific physical way, from about eleven minutes in. She wanted to leave the way a person wants to sneeze. And she did not, and she could not tell you why not.

The sentence, unsaid: I have asked for power for fifteen years and the only unusual thing about me is that I do not leave.

You may know that room. Everything in you wanting the door, and you still in the chair.

Strengthened in the part nobody sees

There is a prayer in Ephesians where Paul asks for power explicitly, and the destination he names for it is the surprise.

That he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in the inner man.Ephesians 3:16

Read the last four words. In the inner man.

He is not asking for something visible. He is asking that a person be reinforced in the part of them nobody can see, by the Spirit, and he asks it as though this is the largest thing he could think of to request.

And notice the scale attached. According to the riches of His glory. Paul does not scale the request to the size of the target. He asks for the whole treasury to be spent on an interior strengthening in ordinary people.

You have been asking for the exact thing this prayer asks for, and Ephesians 3:16 puts the strengthening by the Spirit in the inner man and attaches the riches of God's glory to it, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a prayer offered for a whole church and lands it on a woman who goes home at nine.

Strength in the inner man is a load rating

Consider what strengthening the inside of something is for, because it is a structural idea and it has a very specific use.

You reinforce the interior of a thing so that it can bear more without deforming. It is not decoration and it does not change the outside. What it changes is what the object can hold, and for how long, and under what conditions before something gives.

Which is a precise description of what happens to a person who stays in a room they want to leave. Nothing visible occurs. Something interior holds a load that would otherwise have moved them out of the chair.

And notice that a reinforced beam looks identical to an ordinary one from the outside. That is not a flaw in the engineering, it is the nature of the work, and the only way anybody ever finds out which one they are looking at is by putting weight on it. Fifteen years of rooms she wanted to leave and did not is the only test that was ever available, and it has been running the whole time without her counting it as data.

You have been carrying loads that would have moved you, because the written word asks for strengthening in the inner man rather than for anything anybody could see, and His Spirit is what turns a structural picture into a name for fifteen years.

And notice that Paul asks for it. He does not tell them to develop it. It is a request made to God on their behalf, which means the capacity in question was never something anybody was expected to produce by trying harder.

You were never asked to generate this, and Ephesians 3 puts the whole thing in a petition rather than in an instruction, and the same Spirit who does the strengthening is the one who fills.

Loud is not disqualified either

Now the necessary balance, because this could easily become a comfortable article for quiet people and that would be a different distortion.

There are people who are loud and fast and something genuinely happens when they walk in, and God does that, and none of this is a sly downgrade of them. Her childhood picture is not a false picture. It is a real thing that really occurs.

It is simply not the only thing, and it is not the measure, and it was never the definition of the word. A woman in a corridor saying nothing for a very long time is not the runner up.

You are not the consolation version of anything, because Ephesians 3:16 makes interior strength the subject of the biggest prayer in the letter, and it is His Spirit who makes that a fact about a woman of forty rather than a kindness to the quiet.