Useful Before You Are Finished

Ten past two in the morning, in a room with vinyl chairs and a vending machine that hums.

Owen is in the second chair from the wall. Beside him, close enough that their sleeves are nearly touching, is a young man he has met maybe four times, folded forward with his hands hanging down between his knees and his eyes on the floor tile.

Owen is not the pastor. He is not anybody's counselor. He is not on any list of people you call. He is here because at half past midnight he happened to be the only man awake with a truck, and now he is here, and nobody has come to take over.

In three hours he has said four things. Two of them were: I'll get you a coffee. One was: I'm not going anywhere. The fourth was the young man's name, once, when the crying started, and that was all he could think of.

The whole time, Owen is running the same sentence in the back of his mind. They need somebody better than me. Somebody with the right words. Somebody who has read the right book. Somebody finished.

Because Owen is three years into something he has not gotten over. He does not talk about it. He gets up, he works, he is fine by any measure anybody outside could apply. And underneath, there is a thing that has not resolved, that he has prayed about more times than he could count, and it is still sitting there exactly where it was, and his own hands have not been completely steady since the spring of that year.

He has turned down three things in those three years. A men's group that wanted him to help lead it. A neighbor who asked if he would come alongside her son. A slot on the Wednesday rotation that he wanted so badly he could taste it. Every single time, the same answer, said kindly to them and brutally to himself: not yet. When I am right. When I am past this. Then I will be some use.

At about half past four the young man says, still not looking up, in a completely flat voice:

I'm glad it was you.

And Owen sits there in the vinyl chair not knowing what on earth to do with that.

Now, I do not know what your three years are. I have not been in your house and I would not dream of guessing at what has not mended, and I am not going to poke at it. That is between you and God and it is not my business.

But I know the sentence, because you have been saying it for a while now. When I am right. When I am past this. Then I will be some use to somebody.

And I have come and sat down in the next chair, at ten past two, to tell you that the sentence is not from God, and that you have been standing outside a door that was never locked, waiting to qualify for something you were let into a long time ago.

The sentence was given to a man whose thorn was staying

Hear who this was said to before you hear what it says, because the audience is the whole gift.

Paul had a thing he called a thorn in the flesh. He does not tell us what it was, which is a mercy, because it means every man reading it can hear his own name in the gap. He prayed about it three times. He does not say he prayed badly or that he gave up. He asked, three times, that it would leave him, and it did not leave him.

And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness.2 Corinthians 12:9

That is the answer he got. Not a removal, and not a timetable for one. A sentence in the present tense, handed to a man who was going to get up the next morning with the thorn still in him and go on doing the most useful work anybody has ever done.

Read what the strength is made perfect in, and read it slowly, because most of us read it as though it said after. It is written in 2 Corinthians 12:9 that it is made perfect in weakness, in it, in the middle of the unresolved thing, and the Holy Spirit is the one collapsing three years of waiting down into tonight: you are usable now, in the exact condition you are in, and there is no version of this where the usefulness begins on the far side of the mending.

And then look at what Paul actually does with it. He does not grit his teeth and endure. He says he will glory in his weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon him. Rest upon. Like a weight settling onto something. The place where the power comes down is the place he would have removed if it had been up to him.

A whole pot would have hidden Him

Turn the thing over now and look at the clay, because Paul says it plainly a few chapters earlier.

Second Corinthians 4 says we have this treasure in earthen vessels, and it gives the reason out loud: so that the excellency of the power may be of God and not of us. Not despite the clay. So that. His Spirit is the one who arranged that on purpose: it is already settled that the cracked pot was the design and not the accident, and a whole pot would only have hidden Him.

That is worth sitting in for a second, because it turns your three years completely around. You have been treating the unmended thing as the disqualification. Scripture treats it as the window.

And there is a further line I want in your hands, because it names exactly what happened in that waiting room. His word never once makes comfort something a man passes along after he is over it, and His Spirit is not holding your usefulness in escrow until then. Second Corinthians 1 says God comforts us in our trouble so that we can comfort people in any trouble, with the same comfort we ourselves have received. Received. Not completed. Not graduated from. The young man in the vinyl chair did not need somebody who was over it. He needed somebody who was in it and still sitting up at four in the morning, and that is a thing only an unfinished man can be.

And if the unmended thing has gone somewhere heavier lately, if it has started carrying thoughts you would not say out loud to anybody, then tell one human being today, plainly, and if there is any danger in it reach the crisis line where you live and stay on with a real voice. That door is not a detour from usefulness. Free men walk through it and come back out.