I Am Waiting Until I Am Well Enough

The hard stretch was real and it lasted about two years and this page is not going to be casual about it.

He is not going to describe it here and nobody is asking him to. What matters is that it emptied him in a way he had not known was possible at forty-three, and that he came out the other side of it slower, and that the slowness has not entirely left.

That was five years ago.

And what he has been saying, to himself and to two people who love him, is that he will do something when he is well enough. Which is a completely reasonable thing to say and both of those people accepted it immediately and gratefully, because they had been worried.

Here is the thing he noticed on the beach last week while everybody else was in the water.

He has moved the threshold three times.

At year one, well enough meant sleeping properly. He sleeps properly now, mostly, and has for about two years.

At year three, without ever announcing the change, it meant not dreading things. And he dreads considerably less than he did.

And now, at year five, it has quietly become something about feeling like himself again, which is a threshold he cannot define, cannot measure, and has never described out loud to anybody.

He is not lying to anybody. He genuinely does not feel well enough. He has simply never once noticed that the line keeps moving to stay ahead of him.

What this page is not

Let me be clear before anything else, because this is the sort of subject a page can do damage on.

Nothing here is going to tell you the hard stretch was not real or that you should be over it. It was real, and five years is not long, and nobody who has not been in it gets a vote.

Nothing here is going to tell you to push through anything, do more, or treat your limits as an attitude problem. That is exactly the sort of advice that hurts people and it will not appear on this page.

And nothing here is going to hand you a plan, a direction, or anything that reaches past this week.

You are not being told to be stronger and you are not being handed a program. That is not caution on my part. Scripture handles this in a scene where a prophet asks something of a woman who is genuinely at the end of her resources, and the Holy Spirit has never once required a man to be restored before He would deal with him.

He asks it of somebody with nothing

Here is the scene, and it is startling, and I want you to see how startling it is before anybody softens it.

There is a widow in Zarephath gathering sticks. There is a famine. She tells Elijah, plainly, that she has a handful of meal and a little oil, and that she is gathering sticks to make a last meal for herself and her son, and then they will die. That is what she says. It is in the text.

And Elijah says this.

And Elijah said unto her, Fear not; go and do as thou hast said: but make me thereof a little cake first, and bring it unto me, and after make for thee and for thy son.1 Kings 17:13

Make me a little cake first.

He does not tell her to rest. He does not tell her to wait until she is stronger. He asks a woman with nothing left to do something small before she does anything else.

And notice the size of it. A little cake. Not a meal, not a work, not a commitment. The smallest possible unit of the thing she was already doing.

You are being asked something at the scale of a little cake by somebody who knows exactly how empty you are. I am not stretching that. 1 Kings 17:13 has the ask made of a woman who has just described her own end, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a man on a beach at golden hour.

Fear not comes first

And do not miss the first two words, because they carry the whole tone.

Fear not.

He does not ask before he says that. The instruction is preceded by an assurance, which means the ask is not made in ignorance of her situation. He knows what she just said. He heard the part about dying.

That is not a man being oblivious to how empty she is. That is a man who has taken her emptiness seriously and is still asking for the little cake.

Which is why nothing on this page is going to tell you to be stronger. The ask does not depend on you being stronger. It is made, in Scripture, of somebody who is not.

You are being addressed by somebody who has heard the whole of what the last five years cost, and the ask is small precisely because the hearing was complete. That is 1 Kings 17:13 in its own order, and the Spirit who searches all things has been with you through every one of those five years and is not measuring you against a threshold.

And the threshold that keeps moving

Now the specific thing, and I want to say it gently because it is not an accusation.

You have moved the line three times and not noticed. That is not dishonesty. It is what happens when a threshold is set by a feeling, because feelings recalibrate, and a threshold that recalibrates will always sit just ahead of wherever you actually are.

That is not a character fault. It is a property of the instrument.

Which means the question is not whether you are well enough. It cannot be answered, because the thing doing the answering moves.

The question is only whether there is one ordinary thing in this week, and there is, and it does not require you to be anything.

You are able to do one ordinary thing this week without being well enough, and Scripture never once makes recovery the condition of a next step. The word asks the little cake of a woman at her end, and the Spirit who was given to help our infirmities is not standing on the far side of a threshold you cannot reach.