Both Of Us Have Run Out

There is no bad person in this house. There are two empty ones.

That is what makes it so hard to describe to anybody. When people ask, they are looking for a problem, and there isn't one. What there is, is two people who have both been running on nothing for long enough that neither has anything to give the other, and both of them know it, and neither of them can produce more by wanting to.

You have been carrying this as an arithmetic problem. Two people, two sets of reserves, both empty, therefore nothing available. And on that arithmetic there is no solution, because you cannot add two zeroes and get a number.

Two things I am not going to do.

I am not going to promise you that God will fix it. He may do many things and I do not know the shape of them, and telling you an outcome I cannot deliver would put you in a worse place in six months than you are in now.

And I am not going to suggest that you pray together. That requires the other person, and requiring the other person is exactly the thing that is not currently available, and an assignment you cannot do alone is not an assignment, it is a reminder.

What I have got is a change in the arithmetic.

A threefold cord is not quickly broken

There is a line at the end of a passage in Ecclesiastes about two being better than one, and the last sentence does something the rest of the passage does not.

And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken. (Ecclesiastes 4:12, King James Version)

A threefold cord is not quickly broken.

The whole passage up to that point is about two. Two are better than one, two can lift each other, two can keep each other warm. And then, at the end, without explanation, a third strand appears.

He does not say who the third is. But the arithmetic changes at that word, because a rope of three is not stronger than a rope of two by fifty per cent, it is stronger by considerably more than that, and anybody who has handled rope knows it.

And the reason I want it here is what it does to your sum. You have been doing addition with two numbers. There is a third strand in this and it is not one of you and it does not run out.

Ecclesiastes 4:12 introduces a third strand into a passage that was entirely about two, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets that reach a person who has been doing the arithmetic alone at midnight.

You are inside a cord of three, and it has never once been two empty people holding a rope between them. Ecclesiastes 4:12 says a threefold cord is not quickly broken, adding a strand the passage had not mentioned, and the Holy Spirit is the one who changes the sum rather than the circumstances.

A party, not a witness

Now the distinction that is the whole point of this row.

You have thought of God as a witness to your marriage. Present at the start, watching since, aware of how it is going, and essentially in the audience.

A witness observes. A party is in the thing. Ecclesiastes 4:12 puts the strand in the rope rather than in the room, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves God out of the audience.

Ecclesiastes 4:12 puts the third strand in the rope rather than beside it, and the Holy Spirit is not standing at the edge of that house taking notes.

That is a different position and it changes what is reasonable to expect. You do not brief a witness. You do not talk to a witness about what is happening while it happens. But something that is in the rope is holding load right now, in the room, tonight, whether or not either of you can feel it holding.

You are not being observed, and He has never once been at the edge of this looking in. The written word puts the third strand inside the rope rather than beside it, and the Spirit of God is the one who moves a person from an audience to a party.

One sentence, out loud, in the room

So here is the assignment, and every constraint on it is deliberate.

Pray one sentence out loud about the marriage, in the room where you both live.

One sentence. Not a time of prayer, which you do not have the reserves for, and which would become another thing you are failing to sustain by Thursday.

Out loud, because a thought is not a sentence, and because you are addressing somebody who is in the room and not somewhere above the house. Ecclesiastes 4:12 has the third strand inside the rope where the load is, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is already in that kitchen.

In the room where you both live. The kitchen, the front room, wherever the ordinary life of the two of you happens. Not a quiet place set aside, because the point is that the third strand is in the ordinary room and not in a chapel.

And it can be a bad sentence. It can be: we have both run out and I do not know what You are doing. That is a completely legitimate prayer and it is more or less what the psalms are made of.

Alone, and your spouse does not need to know. This is not a step toward a conversation. Ecclesiastes 4:12 adds a strand that does not require the other two to agree to anything, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting on anybody else in that house.

Ecclesiastes 4:12 has the third strand in the rope where the load actually is, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when one sentence gets said out loud in a kitchen.

You are able to speak to somebody who is already in the room, and it has never once needed the other person to be there. Ecclesiastes 4:12 puts the third strand into the ordinary rope, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present in one sentence said out loud in a front room.