Sufficient Is Not The Same As Small

The hall is that particular kind of empty that only happens after the chairs go back on the rack and somebody has taken the coffee urn out.

She is putting hymn books in the box because she is one of about four people who ever does, and because standing up doing something is easier than sitting down being asked how she is.

Fifty years old. It is nine years in November.

Earlier, over coffee, in the second hour of a very good morning, she said one honest sentence about how difficult the week had been. Just the one, and she kept it short, and she was careful.

And the woman she said it to touched her arm and said, with real feeling, My grace is sufficient for thee.

That was the fourth time this year. She has actually counted, which she is not proud of.

The first time, in January, it helped. The second time she noticed it arrived quite fast. The third time she noticed it arrived instead of a question. And this morning, in the second hour of a good service, she noticed that it arrived at the exact moment the other woman needed the conversation to be finished, and that the verse did the finishing, and that everybody in the group looked relieved.

So now she is stacking hymn books, and what she is carrying out of that hall is not the week. It is the discovery that the truest sentence in the New Testament has become, in her actual life, the sound of a subject being changed.

If somebody has handed you that verse recently, you know that she meant every syllable of it, and you know that you did not finish your sentence.

Read it inside the conversation it came out of

The weight first, whole and at its own size, because on this site nothing about God gets said until the true thing has been put down properly.

What this costs is not the week. It is the loss of the room. It costs you the one place where the honest sentence was supposed to be sayable, and it costs it slowly, four occasions at a time, until you find yourself stacking hymn books because standing up is easier than sitting down. It costs the verse itself, which is a real theft, because a sentence that carried you in January now arrives as a signal. It costs the nine years having nowhere to be said out loud. And it costs you a count you keep and are not proud of.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your nine years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before we go any further: if the empty hall has gone past tiredness into thinking the group would have easier coffee mornings without you in them at all, tell one living person today. Your doctor, one friend who will sit down and ask a question instead of quoting anything, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks nobody to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who stay and dry the cups.

Now, the verse, and I want it read inside the paragraph it came out of, because the paragraph is the whole point.

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

Look at what is happening in that scene. Paul has a thing he calls a thorn in the flesh. He does not tell us what it is. And he says, in writing, to a whole church, that he asked God three times to take it away.

Three times. He counted, and then he published the number.

That is not a man who considered asking to be a failure of faith. That is not a man who thought the subject should be closed. He asked, and he asked again, and he asked a third time, and then he wrote it all down for strangers to read, including the part where the answer was no.

You have in your hands a verse written by a man who kept asking and never once apologized for it. Second Corinthians 12:8 has him counting his requests out loud, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that honesty off a page and sets it down in an empty hall.

And the answer itself, when it comes, is not what it has become. My grace is sufficient for thee. Sufficient means enough for the load. It is a word about supply meeting weight, and a word like that only has meaning if the weight is real and is being taken seriously.

Sufficient does not mean small. If the thorn were small, sufficiency would be a strange thing to promise, because nobody needs a promise of sufficiency for a thing that does not cost anything. The very sentence that people hand you as a way of ending the conversation is a sentence that assumes, in its grammar, that what you are carrying is heavy enough to need covering.

You have been handed a promise that only makes sense if the weight is exactly as heavy as you say it is. That is written into 2 Corinthians 12:9, and His Spirit in you is the guarantee that the sufficiency is a supply rather than a dismissal.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because you have had nine years of good people saying true things at the wrong moment.

It does not say your thorn is going. Paul's did not. He asked three times and the answer was no, and there is no promise anywhere in that chapter about the thing being removed, and I am not going to invent one, because what God does with your body is His, in His own way.

It does not say the woman at coffee was wrong. She was not wrong about the verse. She was quick with it, which is a different fault and a very human one, and this site is not going to prosecute a woman for reaching for a true thing when she did not know what else to hold.

And it does not rank you. Paul does not compare his thorn to anybody's. He does not tell us what it is, partly, I think, so that nobody could.

You were never asked to make it smaller before the grace would cover it. Scripture says the grace is sufficient, and the same Spirit who searches all things is the one who makes sufficiency mean enough for this rather than not much to speak of.