It Fits On An Index Card

Vern eats lunch in the truck because the radio in the truck is better than the conversation on the slab, and because at sixty-one a man is allowed to sit down for twenty minutes without explaining himself.

Half-built house. Framing up, roof on, no windows yet. Wind going straight through it.

He unbuttons the flap on his shirt pocket and takes out the card to check a number.

It is a plain white index card, cut down with a utility knife so it fits the pocket. He has been carrying one version or another of that card for thirty-four years. This one has been through the wash twice and the corners have gone soft and furry, and it has torque values on it, and a phone number for a supply house that closed in 2021 and that he has never crossed out.

He checks his number. He does not put the card away.

He sits there with it flat between two fingers and turns it over and looks at the blank side, and the thought arrives the way the true ones do, sideways and without being asked for.

Everything I would still say about God, without checking, without hedging, without putting a but on the end of it, would go on that side.

With room left.

That is not a guess. He has never written it out and he is not going to, because he does not need to. He knows exactly what would go on there and he knows exactly how much space it would take.

At forty he had a shelf. He could talk for an hour and often did, in a folding chair with a mug going cold, and he was not showing off, he meant every word of it.

Now this.

And it is not the number of lines that gets him. It is the weight.

He lays the card flat on his open palm and holds it there. Sixty-one years old, in a truck, on his lunch break, weighing a piece of cardstock.

He cannot feel it.

The thing he has not said out loud to anybody, not to Loretta, not to his brother, not to the one man he might have said it to, is this. He still prays every day. Every single day, in the truck, before the key goes in. He just prays a card's worth now.

At six minutes to one he buttons the card back into his pocket and gets out and steps up onto the slab, which is four inches of concrete over compacted fill and holds up an entire house and does not know one thing about him.

And Vern stands on it with his lunch box in his hand, sixty-one years old, and feels like a man standing on nothing.

Sufficient is not a word about size

I am going to tell you at the top what I am not going to do, so that you can relax and read the rest of this without waiting for it.

I am not going to promise you it comes back.

That is the offer this kind of message usually makes, somewhere around the middle, in a warm voice: hold on, this is a season, it will be bigger than before. I do not know that. Nobody who says it to you knows it, and if it does not happen the way they said, you will not conclude that they were wrong, you will blame yourself. I am not putting that in your hands.

I am also not going to hand you anything to add. No practice, no list, no five things to rebuild with. You did not come here to be given a project.

What I am going to do is take one word apart in front of you, because everything turns on it.

Paul asked three times. Not once, in passing. Three times, about a thing he calls a thorn, and what he wanted was for it to be gone, and any of us would have wanted the same.

And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.2 Corinthians 12:9

Now look at what did not happen there.

The thorn was not removed. Paul was not enlarged. He did not get his old capacity back with interest, and the letter does not hint that he would later. God said one thing to him and it was not about restoration at all. It was about sufficiency.

And sufficient is a load word. It is not a size word.

It is the word an engineer writes at the bottom of a page after he has run the numbers. It means: enough for what will be put on it. Nobody signing off a beam writes down that it is big, or that it is impressive, or that it used to be bigger. He writes that it is sufficient, and that is the end of the matter, and men who have never met him walk on that floor for eighty years.

So this is true of you tonight and it does not wait on you feeling it: what you have left is sufficient. That is not my encouragement, it is God's own word to a man who asked three times and did not get the thing he asked for, written down in 2 Corinthians 12:9. He said it once to a man on his third refusal, and His Spirit has never stopped saying it, and He is saying it tonight over a card that weighs nothing.

Here is the part Vern got wrong on the slab, and you may be getting it wrong the same way.

You are not standing on the card.

The card is a label. The whole weight is on the One the card names, and He is not smaller than He was in the folding chair with the mug going cold. He has not been reduced along with your vocabulary. His word says His strength is made perfect in weakness, which means the smallness is not a problem He is working around, and what has been holding you up through it is His Spirit, and always was.

Read that verse again and notice that Paul stops fighting it in the same breath.

Most gladly, he says. Not resigned. Not making peace with a disappointment. Glad. Something about the arrangement turned out to be better than what he had asked for, and it took a man three refusals to find it out.

Now I want to say the hardest thing in this message, and I want to say it plainly, because a soft version of it would be a lie.

Your faith may not get bigger than it is now.

I do not know either way. And I am telling you that the sufficiency does not depend on the answer. If it stays exactly this size for the rest of your life, that is not a diminished Christian life and it is not a holding pattern and it is not a stage on the way to something. It is a man standing on four inches of concrete over compacted fill, which is not much concrete, and which holds up an entire house.

And nobody here is going to tell you that a card-sized faith means something slipped through your hands, because that is not what happened and it was never true. What you have left is not the wreckage of what you had. It is the part that was load-bearing all along, and the reason you can see it now is that everything sitting on top of it has been taken off.

You are standing. Right now, this evening, on the smallest amount of certainty you have had since you were a young person, you are still upright and you are still praying every day before the key goes in. That is written into what Scripture means by sufficient grace, and it is His Spirit under you, not your grip on the card.