Go Back In · Week 3 · Thursday
For as long as anyone has known him, he has been the one who handles it. The one you call. The one who does not call anyone. He fixed his own things, carried his own weight, and quietly believed that needing help was a failure other people were entitled to and he was not.
Then something shifted — age, or a season, or a plain limit he could not out-work — and the room he belonged in became a room where he would have to receive. Be helped. Take a seat he did not run. And rather than walk in needy, he stopped walking in at all.
How hard for those who have much
When the man in Mark walks away, Jesus turns to the disciples and says a hard thing.
Then Jesus looked around and said to His disciples, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God!”Mark 10:23 (BSB)
But watch what He does next, because most people miss it.
And the disciples were amazed at His words. But Jesus said to them again, “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”Mark 10:24–25 (BSB)
He drops the qualifier. Not the ones with much money — everyone. Because the thing that makes the door hard is not the size of an account. It is fullness. A man who is full of his own sufficiency has no empty hand to receive with, and the kingdom is only ever received. A camel through a needle is not a hard thing. It is an impossible thing — for the camel — which is exactly the point He is about to make.
He would rather be capable and outside than helped and in.
The move
So on Thursday the man who needs no one does the hardest thing in his vocabulary. He asks. He walks back into the room and lets someone else carry part of it, and he sits in the seat he does not run, and he does not fix anything.
The man in Mark had much, and it kept him out. Thursday’s man has much too — much competence, much self-reliance, a lifetime of handling it — and it keeps him out the same way. The door is narrow not because God is stingy, but because you cannot carry your own sufficiency through it. You have to set it down and go in with your hands empty.
What moves outside his own head is small and it is everything: he lets one person see him need something. For a man who has spent his whole life making sure no one ever did, that is the entire surrender.
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