The One Who Shows Up

He has a truck and a full toolbox, and that is the whole explanation for the last eleven years of his life.

Six moves this year. Two of them for people he does not know well, who were given his number by somebody else. A funeral in March where he drove three carloads and then stayed and stacked the chairs. A washing machine in June that took two of them four hours because the doorway was wrong. A run to the dump for a woman clearing her mother's house, which took a whole Saturday, and which he does not regret.

He is forty eight.

He has not had a Saturday that belonged to him since the spring, and he only knows that because his wife said it out loud in April in a completely neutral voice while she was doing something else.

He is not resentful. That is important. He would fight anybody who suggested he was. He likes being the one who shows up. There is something in it that is genuinely his, and it comes from his father, who did the same, and it is one of the few things he is sure about.

What he has noticed, and has not mentioned, is a change in the getting there.

For years he would get a message and something in him would lift. Now he gets a message and there is a gap, maybe half a second, before he starts typing yes, and in that half second there is something he does not have a name for and does not like.

The sentence, unsaid: I still want to be the man who comes, and something in me is not making it to the truck any more.

You may know that half second. Still willing, and something underneath it running out.

Two things at once, on two schedules

There is a sentence in Paul's second letter to Corinth that most people quote as encouragement, and it is not encouragement. It is a description of two processes running at the same time.

For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.2 Corinthians 4:16

Read it as a report rather than as a pep talk. The outward man perishes. Paul says so, flatly, without softening it, about himself, in the middle of a list of the things that had been done to him.

He does not say the wearing out is imaginary. He does not say a person with better faith would not wear out. He says it happens, and then he says something else is happening at the same time and on its own schedule.

You are wearing out and that is being reported honestly, and 2 Corinthians 4:16 names the outward perishing without softening it and never treats it as a failure, and it is His Spirit who takes a line written by a man who had been beaten and shipwrecked and lands it on somebody sitting in a truck reading a message.

Day by day is a frequency

Consider the phrase at the end, because it is the practical part and it is easy to read past.

Renewed day by day. That is a rate. It is not renewed once, and it is not renewed when things calm down. It is a daily figure, set against a daily wearing, and the whole comfort of the sentence is that the two run in parallel.

Which means the half second before he types yes is not the beginning of the end of him. It is a reading from one of the two processes, and there is a second one that has its own supply and its own schedule.

You have something being renewed on a daily cycle underneath all of it, because the written word sets the inward renewal at day by day against the outward perishing, and the Holy Spirit is what turns that from a nice symmetry into something a man can actually draw on.

And notice the words Paul chooses for the two. Outward and inward. He is not comparing a good man to a bad one, or a strong week to a weak one. He is describing one person with two layers, both real, both being accurately reported.

You are one man with two things happening in you, and 2 Corinthians 4 refuses to resolve the tension by denying either half, and the same Spirit who does the renewing is the one who fills.

Where the load is bigger than one man

I want to stop and say something plainly, because this site will not praise anybody for absorbing what one person cannot absorb.

Six moves, a funeral, and every Saturday since spring, at forty eight, on top of a job, is more than one man should be doing without anything coming back, and saying so is not a criticism of how he has done it. Tell a doctor plainly how tired he is, including the half second, because a change in how a thing feels is real medical information and not a character note. Ask his wife what she has been seeing, since she raised it once in April and has not since. And say no to one thing this month, out loud, on the phone, without inventing a reason, which will be harder than any of the moves.

And if the tiredness has begun going somewhere heavier than tiredness, or the thought of not being here has started to feel restful rather than frightening, dial or text 988 in the United States, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and talk to a person tonight.

Saying no to one Saturday is not becoming a different man. You are held exactly as much on the Saturday you stay home as on the six you drove, because 2 Corinthians 4:16 puts the renewing on God's schedule and not on the man's output, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that true in the body rather than only in a letter.