The One Everybody Leans On

Ask anybody who knows him and they will use the same word within about four seconds. Steady.

His sister rings him when something has gone wrong at three in the afternoon. His crew ask him when a job goes sideways and there is a decision nobody wants. His neighbor came round about a hospital letter. A young man he trained six years ago still calls, which he is genuinely glad about.

He is fifty. And in all of it, over about twenty-five years, no one has ever asked him what his own steadiness is standing on.

That is not an accusation of anybody. They are not unkind people. It is simply that steadiness is invisible in the way a floor is invisible, and nobody thinks to ask a floor how it is doing.

What he has noticed lately, and mentioned to nobody, is that he goes very quiet in the evenings. Not upset. Quiet. He sits and does not really do anything for about an hour, and if his wife asks he says he is tired, and that is true and it is also not the shape of it. What is closer to true is that he has been giving something out all day that he does not know how to top up, and he does not know where the supply comes from and has never once had to look.

Anybody who is the steady one for a lot of people knows this. And I want to say at the start that nothing here calls him a fake. He is genuinely steady. The steadiness is real. The question is what it stands on, and nobody has asked it, so he has not either.

Renewed day by day, and it is not the outside

Let me put down a line and note the two directions it runs in at once.

For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.2 Corinthians 4:16

Two things happening simultaneously. The outward wearing out. The inward being renewed. Paul does not pretend the first one is not happening and he does not present the second as compensation for it.

And notice the tense on the renewing. Day by day, which is present and continuous, and passive, which means it is being done rather than achieved. Paul does not say the inward man renews himself.

You are being renewed daily on the inside, and the renewing is done to you rather than by you. That is not a soft word for a man on a low wall at the end of a day. It is what is written in 2 Corinthians 4, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a written line and puts it into somebody who has been giving out since eight in the morning. The outward wears. The renewing is God's and it is daily.

And it is worth knowing the state Paul was in when he wrote it. Two chapters of beatings, shipwrecks, pressure from every direction and a list of things that had gone wrong. He is not a man describing an easy inner life. He is describing something running underneath a very hard one.

You have a supply that has been running underneath twenty-five years without anybody having to ask about it. 2 Corinthians 4:16 is the written word for it, and His Spirit is the one who makes an old letter land in a man watching a tide come in.

Nobody is going to be called a fraud

Now the part this category exists for, and it goes ahead of everything.

He is not putting it on. This is important because there is a version of this article, popular and wrong, that tells the steady man his steadiness is a performance and that he needs to let people see the real him. That version treats a genuine gift as a symptom and it does damage.

What is true is narrower. He is steady, and the steadiness is real, and the supply for it is not his own, and because nobody has ever asked him about it he has never once looked at where it comes from, and so he has been drawing on it like a man drawing on a bank account he has never checked.

The second thing this article will not do is make his ache smaller because his life looks fine. It looks extremely fine. He is well liked and well used and both of those are real. The hour of quiet in the evening is not less heavy because the day was good.

They that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength.Isaiah 40:31

Notice the grammar there is often misread. In the Hebrew the waiting ones exchange strength: they trade what they have for His. It is not a technique for producing more of your own.

You were built to trade your strength for His rather than to generate more of your own. Isaiah 40:31 is the line it rests on, and it is the Spirit who shows a capable man that his supply was never a private reservoir.

You are held right now, at the end of a day you gave away, and the renewing has been running while nobody asked. It is written that the inward man is renewed day by day, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that true in a man who goes quiet for an hour every evening.

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 plainly about the quiet hour rather than saying tired. The people everybody leans on are routinely the last to be asked how they are, and being renewed by God has never been a reason to go without a real person in the room.