Above Strength

She parked in the far row of the juvenile courthouse lot at 7:41 and left the engine running. The check engine light had been on since August. On the passenger seat sat a manila folder with a young man’s name on the tab and four continuance dates written down the margin in her own handwriting, each one a little smaller than the last.

At 2 a.m. she had typed a resignation email. She did not send it. She saved it to drafts, which felt like a kind of faithfulness at the time.

Her husband thought she was tired. Her pastor had asked on Sunday, and she had said, “Good, busy, you know.” She was very good at good. She had been carrying that boy’s case, and nine others, and her mother’s prescriptions, and a story she never said out loud: if I put this down, it falls, and nobody else will pick it up.

That story was killing her. The work was hard. The story made it unbearable.

Paul wrote to a church that already doubted him, people who would have loved a reason to call him weak, and he handed them one:

For we would not, brethren, have you ignorant of our trouble which came to us in Asia, that we were pressed out of measure, above strength, insomuch that we despaired even of life: But we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the dead. (2 Corinthians 1:8-9)

“Pressed” is a word for being weighed down, the way you would load an animal past what it can haul. “Above strength” means what it says. This is a man who had been beaten, run out of cities and left for dead, and he is telling you he ran out.

Then the word “sentence.” Paul reaches for a term found nowhere else in the New Testament, apokrimaan official answer, a ruling handed down. Somewhere in Asia he sat with a verdict inside himself: you will not make it. Paul never explains where the trouble came from. He tells you what it did. “That we should not trust in ourselves.”

Read that slowly if you are proud of how much you can carry. Some of what we call perseverance is self-trust in work boots. We keep showing up, and somewhere along the way we stopped praying, because prayer would mean admitting the weight, and admitting the weight would crack the image. Busyness becomes a very respectable place to hide from God. The mind guards that image hard. The more tired we get, the more we hide, and the more we hide, the heavier it gets, until a saved draft at 2 a.m. looks like the only honest thing we have written in months.

Paul’s way through has nothing to do with finding a deeper reserve. He names God by what God does with dead things. He raises them. Paul meant that literally; he had met the risen Jesus on a road. The God he trusted at the bottom had already gone into the grave and walked out.

Jesus did not hide the weight either. In Gethsemane he told his friends, “My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death,” and asked them to stay awake with him (Matthew 26:38). The Son of God asked for company. Then he went and received the sentence of death that belonged to us, the real one, in a real courtroom, from men who lied about him, and he prayed for them while it was carried out. The Father raised him. If you belong to Christ, you are joined to that life, and the Spirit who raised Jesus lives in you (Romans 8:11). Your endurance does not have to be manufactured at a red light on fumes. It can be received.

And look who else is in that courthouse. The young man in the folder has had verdicts spoken over him since before he could read. Some came from people who were exhausted too. A worker who burns out in secret passes the despair down the hall without meaning to. A worker who has laid her own sentence at the feet of the God who raises the dead can sit across from a sixteen-year-old and believe, with a straight face, that people change.

Two verses later Paul asks the Corinthians to keep “helping together by prayer” (2 Corinthians 1:11). The apostle let the people who doubted him see him weak, then asked them to carry him. That is what endurance looked like for him.

If “despaired even of life” is not a figure of speech for you this morning, tell someone today. In the U.S. you can call or text 988. That is the same obedience.

She turned the engine off at 7:52. Before she went in, she called her sister and said the first true thing she had said in weeks: “I can’t carry this.”

Then she picked up the folder and went in.