She Built It All on Coping

She has an expression people use about her and they mean it as a compliment. They say: nothing throws her.

It has been true for a long time. Her father's illness, the year the money went, the move, the thing with her sister that nobody in the family will discuss. Through all of it she was the one who kept working and kept cooking and kept the small machinery of a household running, and if you asked her how she did it she would say you just get on with it, which is not an explanation, it is a description of a person who has never had another option.

What has changed is small and she has told nobody. Three weeks ago a delivery came to the wrong address and she stood in the hallway with the label in her hand and could not think what to do about it. Not upset. Blank. She stood there for a while, and then put the parcel by the door, and it is still there.

Since then she has been noticing other things. A form she cannot start. A message from a friend she has read eleven times and not answered. Nothing catastrophic and nothing anybody else can see, and all of it pointing at the same fact, which is that the thing that has held her life together for twenty years is a capacity, and the capacity is thinning.

That is a frightening discovery and I am not going to hurry it, because it deserves to be looked at. If a woman has been the one who absorbs, then everything in her life is stacked on the absorbing, and a thinning capacity is not a mood, it is a structural question. Plenty of people are living on the same arrangement without a coastline anywhere near them. I have no word about the parcel. What I want to talk about is the ground.

The stability of your times

I want to put a line down that hardly ever gets read aloud, and I want to look at what it makes stable.

And wisdom and knowledge shall be the stability of thy times, and strength of salvation: the fear of the LORD is his treasure.Isaiah 33:6

Stability of thy times. Not stability of thy circumstances. Isaiah is writing to a city under siege by an empire, and he does not tell them the siege lifts. He tells them where the steadiness in a period of a person's life actually comes from, and it is not from the person's ability to withstand things.

That distinction is the whole message for a woman standing in a hallway with a label in her hand. Her capacity was never designed to be the stability of her times. It was a real strength that got quietly promoted into a foundation, and foundations do not thin, which is why the thinning feels like the end of the world rather than the end of a season of unusual strength.

You are stabilized by the Lord Himself rather than by how much you can take. That is not a kind thing said to a tired woman. It is what is written in Isaiah 33, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a written line and sets it under somebody at the edge of running water. The capacity is a gift. It was never the ground.

And notice what Isaiah names as the treasure at the end of that verse. Not resilience. Not stamina. The fear of the Lord, which in that whole book means something closer to being rightly oriented toward Someone enormous than being frightened.

You have a treasure that does not thin, and it was never located in your own reserves. Isaiah 33:6 is the text this sits on, and His Spirit is the one who makes an old wartime promise land in a woman walking barefoot on black rock.

What is actually being lost

Now the honest part, because I refuse to pretend nothing is being lost here.

Something real is going. A woman who could absorb anything is finding out that she cannot absorb everything forever, and that is a loss, and it should be grieved rather than reframed. She has been strong in a way that was genuinely admirable, and other people have been sheltered by it, and the sheltering was real. Nobody should hand her a lesson about it.

But I want to name what it cost, because nobody has, and she will not say it herself.

Absorbing has a price. Every hard thing that went in had to go somewhere, and it did not evaporate. It went into a body. Twenty years of you just get on with it is twenty years of a person putting things down inside herself in a place that has no drain, and the thinning is not a failure of character. It is a container that has been carrying what a foundation was supposed to carry.

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.Matthew 11:28

Notice He does not say I will make you stronger. He says come, and He says rest, and He says it to people who are described by their load rather than by their weakness.

You were invited to bring the load rather than to expand to hold it, and the invitation is as old as the gospel. Matthew 11:28 is where the word puts it, and it is the Spirit who turns an invitation on a page into something a capable woman will actually accept.

You are held right now, on the day the capacity ran out, and the holding did not depend on it in the first place. It is written that wisdom and knowledge are the stability of your times, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that true in a woman who has not been able to answer a message in three weeks.

If any of this ever turns dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and tell a doctor or a counselor the plain truth about the blankness in the hallway. Being stabilized by the Lord has never been a reason for a strong woman to face something alone that needs a person in the room.