Open Hands · Week 3 · Friday · INSECURITY

There is a card taped to the inside front panel of her desk drawer. The corners have gone soft. She has had some version of it for most of her working life, and she replaces it when it wears through.

It is a workaround for one thing — a particular kind of task that everyone around her appears to do without effort and that she has never been able to do that way.

The card is the smallest part of the system. The system is enormous. It includes the order she takes meetings in, which questions she volunteers for so that she is not handed the other kind, the thirty minutes she arrives early, the colleague she asks a casual-sounding question of roughly once a week. None of it is dishonest.

And it works. In years, nobody has noticed. That is the achievement, and it is also exactly the cost: she maintains the whole apparatus every working day, and it has never once made her less afraid of being found out. Concealment does not reduce fear. It feeds it, because every successful day is further evidence that the thing is unspeakable.

He Asked Three Times

Paul has something he calls a thorn. He does not tell us what it is, which is probably mercy, because it means everyone reading can put their own there.

He asked for it to be taken away. Three times, which is a detail he did not have to include and which tells you how much he wanted it gone.

But He said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is perfected in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly in my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest on me.2 Corinthians 12:9 (BSB)

The answer is no. And then it is something considerably stranger than no, which is why this passage keeps hold of people.

God does not say the weakness is unimportant, or that Paul is stronger than he thinks, or that it will be removed later. He says the weakness is where the power rests. Not in spite of — perfected in. The flaw is the site.

That is why, for the sake of Christ, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.2 Corinthians 12:10 (BSB)

She had built a system to keep hidden the one place God says the power rests.

What It Cost

She told one person.

Not the department. Not her manager, not yet. One colleague, on a Wednesday afternoon, in actual words rather than hints — here is the thing I cannot do, here is what I have been doing about it for eleven years.

She said the four seconds before he answered were the longest of her professional life.

He was kind, and a bit puzzled, and then said something that genuinely surprised her: that he had wondered for years about something else entirely, something she had never worried about for a second, and had never asked.

The card is still taped in the drawer. She has not taken it down and may never need to. What has changed is that one person in that building knows it is there, which means she is no longer the only one holding it — and that, not the card, was the weight.