I Know We Should Go And I Have Nothing Left

Both of those are true at once and that is the whole difficulty.

You know it would be good for them. You are not confused about that. Nobody needs to explain the benefit to you, and the explaining is most of what you get offered.

And there is nothing there. Not reluctance. Nothing. The tank does not have a low reading, it has no reading.

So what you carry around is two things welded together: an accurate knowledge of what would help your children, and a complete inability to produce it. And the weld is guilt, and it is heavier than either half.

I want to take a hammer to the weld rather than to either of the pieces, because the pieces are both true and the weld is not.

Arise and eat

There is a scene in Kings about a man at the end of himself, and what happens to him is not what anybody expects.

And as he lay and slept under a juniper tree, behold, then an angel touched him, and said unto him, Arise and eat. (1 Kings 19:5, King James Version)

Arise and eat.

Now look at what came before this. The man has just asked to die. He has run a long way, he is finished, and he has said so out loud to God in about the plainest terms available.

And the response is not a rebuke, not a correction, and not a reminder of what he had recently accomplished. He is allowed to sleep. And then he is fed. And then he is allowed to sleep again, and fed again, before one word of instruction arrives.

You are not going to be reasoned with first, and it was never a lecture that got handed to somebody at the end of themselves. 1 Kings 19:5 puts sleep and food ahead of any instruction at all, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as care rather than as a delay before the real message.

And notice what he is not asked to do. Not to explain himself. Not to repent of the asking to die. Not to be encouraged about his own usefulness. He is touched, and told to get up and eat, which is about the smallest instruction a person can be given.

You have been given something you can actually do, and it was never a large obedience that was asked of somebody with nothing. The written word gives an instruction the size of a meal, and the Spirit of God is what makes a very small action a complete response.

The weld is not true

Now the weld, because that is what I came for.

The guilt says: she knows what would help them and she is not doing it, therefore she is choosing not to.

That is the whole argument, and it is wrong in the middle. Knowing a thing and being able to do it are not the same, and the guilt treats them as the same, and that is the only reason it works.

A person with nothing is not withholding. There is a difference between a closed hand and an empty one, and guilt cannot tell them apart, and an empty hand has been treated as a closed one for two years by an argument running inside one head. Being this tired is not a failure, and ten minutes or a rest are both allowed, and neither one condemns you.

You are not withholding anything from your children, and it was never a choice that produced these two years. 1 Kings 19 gives sleep and food to a man before any word arrives, which is exactly why the Spirit of God does not argue with somebody who has nothing.

And here is why this row is on this site at all. Every other article here asks you to go outside. This one exists to say that on the days there is nothing, staying in is a complete answer, and that if this site could not say that, everything else it said would be a way of making you feel worse.

Ten minutes, or sleep

So the practical part, and there are two of them and they are equal.

If there is anything at all in you, open the front door and sit on the step for ten minutes. Nothing organized. No shoes on anybody. Just the air, and whoever comes out.

You are able to do the smallest available thing, and it has never once been a lesser version of taking your children outside. The passage gives an instruction the size of getting up and eating, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with somebody sitting in a doorway with nothing organized.

And if there is nothing, do not. Sleep if sleep is available. Sit in a chair if it is not. Let the day be a day where nobody went anywhere, and add nothing at all to it afterward.

Because the man under the juniper tree was allowed to sleep twice before anybody asked him anything, and nobody in that account describes it as a setback.

You are permitted the sleep as much as the step, and one of them has never once been the failed version of the other. 1 Kings 19:5 records two sleeps and two meals before any instruction, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present in a house on the day nobody goes out.