Get Up and Walk · Week 2 · Thursday

Yes, Me Too

He has hidden it from his sons for twenty years.

The anxiety. The bad nights. The way his chest still tightens in certain meetings, certain phone calls, certain quiet moments when nothing in particular has gone wrong. He has hidden it because he does not want his sons to see Dad weak. He has hidden it because his own father modeled the man who never showed cracks. He has hidden it because he has always believed it was the thing about him a real man would have outgrown by now.

He has always believed it was the thing about him a real man would have outgrown by now.

He is good at hiding it. After two decades of practice, he is exceptional. His coworkers do not know. His friends do not know. His wife knows the edges of it but does not know how often the bad nights are. His sons do not know at all. He is sure of that. He has been sure of that for two decades.

He has been sure of that until tonight.

What Came Downstairs

It is almost midnight. He is at the kitchen island finishing the day. He hears the floorboards in the upstairs hallway. His seventeen-year-old comes down the stairs slowly. Sits on the stool across the island. Does not look at him.

“Dad.”

Then, after a long pause, quieter:

“Do you ever feel like everything is too much?”

Twenty years of hiding evaporate in one sentence.

He almost says the script he has rehearsed since he was seventeen himself. Everything is fine. You’ll be fine. You’re a strong kid. Just push through it. The same script his own father used on him. The same script that almost broke him twice in his twenties before he learned what actually worked.

He says something different.

“Yes. Let me tell you what helped me.”

Biblical Backdrop

Paul wrote a sentence in 2 Corinthians that almost nobody quotes correctly. We love the second half. We forget the first half, which is the part that actually makes the second half make sense.

Paul has just spent a paragraph describing his “thorn in the flesh.” Scholars debate forever what the thorn was. A physical illness. An eye problem. A persistent temptation. A specific enemy. Paul never tells us, which is probably on purpose. Whatever it was, he hated it. He prayed three times for God to take it. God did not.

Then Paul records what God said back.

My power is made perfect in weakness. Made perfect. Brought to completion. Made fully what it was meant to be. Not in spite of the weakness. In it.

This is the same theological principle running underneath the Ehud story. God did not deliver Israel from eighteen years of Moabite oppression in spite of Ehud’s bound right hand. He delivered them through it. The defect was the strategy. The thorn was the spear point.

The thing Paul wanted gone was the very thing God was working through.

What Came Out at the Kitchen Island

He does not give his son a sermon. He does not give him a verse. He tells him the truth.

He tells him about the bad nights in his early twenties. About the work meeting in his thirties when he had to leave the room and his wife had to come get him. About the years he tried to white-knuckle it and how that almost broke them. About the slow learning of small daily habits that actually move the needle. About the specific friend he called when it got bad and how having one person who knew was the thing that saved him. About the prayer that he never thought God answered until he looked back and realized God had been answering it with twenty years of slowly growing him through the thing he wanted gone.

His son does not say much back. He does not need to. They sit at the island until the kitchen clock reads one in the morning, and then his son walks back upstairs. The dad sits there for another hour by himself.

The thing he had spent two decades treating as his disqualification just became the bridge his son needed to walk across.

The thorn was the bridge. It always was.

The thing they called your defect is the thing God will use.

Tomorrow · First Light On