I Cannot Get Up For It Any More

She could always find it and now she cannot, and that is the whole of what has happened.

For about twenty years she was the one. Not the leader, and not on the platform, but the one whose energy went into a room and changed the temperature of it. She could walk into a flat evening at half past seven and by eight there would be something going on, and she never planned it and could not have explained the mechanism.

She would say it was Him. She still would.

And since about last autumn she has not been able to find it.

She turns up. She has not missed anything. She does what she has always done and she says the things she has always said, and it comes out flat, and she can hear it coming out flat, and she goes home.

There is nothing wrong in her life that would explain it. She has looked. That is the first thing everybody asks and she has been through all of it honestly and the answer is no.

And here is what she has concluded, and she has not said it to a single person, because saying it out loud would frighten people who rely on her.

She thinks He has lifted off her.

Not in anger. She is not carrying guilt about a specific thing. It is a quieter and more frightening thought than that: that there was a season, and He was in it, and it was twenty years long, and it has ended, and this flatness is simply what afterwards feels like.

And that is you at your own kitchen table, or you would not still be reading.

He has not lifted off you

Let me say the thing first and then show you where it is written, because you have carried this since autumn and you should not have to wait for it.

He has not lifted off you.

There is nothing in Scripture that describes the Holy Spirit withdrawing from somebody because their energy ran out, and there is nothing that treats depletion as a sign of departure, and the whole idea comes from watching a season end and having no other explanation available.

You are dwelt in tonight, and the flatness since autumn is not a withdrawal. It is written that He will never leave you nor forsake you (Hebrews 13:5), and never is not qualified anywhere by how a person is performing. The Holy Spirit did not lift off a woman in her fifties because a room stopped changing temperature when she walked into it.

Now the verse for the actual condition, and notice who it is addressed to.

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

The faint. Him who has no might.

That is not a promise made to the strong to keep them strong. It is aimed, deliberately and specifically, at people who have run out, and the giving in it is entirely one directional.

And read the next lines, because Isaiah does something surprising with them.

Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted.

He does not say the strong stay strong. He says the strongest available category of person falls over, as a matter of course, and then puts the promise on the other side of that.

You are the person that verse is addressed to, and being faint is the qualification rather than the disqualification. It is written that He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might He increases strength (Isaiah 40:29). The Holy Spirit gives to the empty, and the emptiness is the condition named in the sentence.

And I am not going to tell you what the twenty years were or whether that particular thing comes back. I do not know. Nobody knows and a page that guesses at the shape of your next decade is not being honest with you.

You are not required to produce the room again for the indwelling to hold. It is written that the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you (Romans 8:11), and dwelling is not contingent on output. The Holy Spirit is in a woman who turns up and says the same things and hears them come out flat.

And say this plainly with me. If the flatness has gone somewhere further than flat, if there have been thoughts about not being here at all, tell one person this week and tell your doctor. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one human being who knows your name. Being the one everybody relies on does not disqualify you from being the one who rings.