I Cannot Get Up The Ladder

It is the third rung. That is the detail he keeps returning to, sitting in the kitchen afterwards with tea going cold. Not halfway. Not the top. The third rung, which is about knee height on a normal man.

He has had that ladder since 1987. It has been in more houses on that road than he could list, and there are four families who ring him first, before anybody with a van, because he charges what a thing is worth and turns up when he says he will.

This morning it was a gutter. A gutter is nothing. He has done that gutter nine or ten times.

And his foot went on the first rung and it was fine, and the second and it was fine, and on the third something in his hip and something in his balance and something in his chest all said the same word at the same time, and he came back down, and he stood there with both hands on the stiles.

The worst part is that Marjorie was in her doorway, and young Kev was two gardens up with a strimmer, and both of them saw. Kev came over. He was kind about it. He got up there in eleven seconds and did the gutter in three minutes.

That is the whole event and it sounds like nothing written down.

The sentence came in the kitchen, not on the ladder. Not I am getting old. It is: I am the one who does this, and now somebody has to do it for me.

You know that sentence. It might be a ladder, or a lid you cannot open, or a hill you used to walk without thinking. There is a thing you were the one who did, and now you are the one it gets done for, and nobody warns you that the change happens in a single ordinary morning in front of two neighbors.

Who the meek actually are

There is a line in a psalm and it has been misread for so long that the word in it has gone soft. It has not gone soft.

The LORD lifteth up the meek: he casteth the wicked down to the ground.Psalm 147:6

The meek in Scripture are not the timid. They are the ones with no leverage. The word covers the poor, the afflicted, the ones who cannot make a situation go their way and have stopped being able to pretend otherwise. It is not a personality. It is a position, and a man standing at the foot of a ladder with his hands on the stiles is standing in it.

And the psalm does not say the meek should try harder. It says the Lord lifts them up. That is the whole action of the verse, and every bit of it belongs to Him.

You are one of the ones God lifts up, and He was lifting you this morning at the third rung in front of Marjorie and Kev. That is what the written word says over you and not a soft thing invented to make an old man feel better, and the Holy Spirit who is in you at this kitchen table is the evidence that the lifting has never once come out of your own legs.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic you have been running with the tea going cold. If the lifting is His, then a third rung is information about a hip and a set of years that come to everybody who lives long enough. It is not information about who you are, and it never had the right to become that.

Being the one it gets done for

Here is the second thing, and it is the actual splinter.

It is not the gutter. It is the direction of the traffic. For forty years the arriving was yours. Now somebody comes over. And there is a lie sitting underneath that reversal which says a man is worth what he can still do for other people, and that when the doing stops the worth follows it down the ladder.

You have never believed that about anybody else. You have carried tools to men in their eighties for years and never once thought less of one of them.

You have been held through every one of those forty years, and the holding does not adjust itself when a man stops climbing. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit doing that work in you rather than assessing what you can still reach.

There is something worth saying plainly, because this is exactly where a message like this could turn into a push and it will not. Nothing here is telling you to get back up that ladder. Nothing here is going to say the words a person your age hears far too often, about not giving in. If that ladder goes to Kev this year and you never climb again you have not stepped one inch outside anything God is doing, because His lifting of you was never a reward for climbing.

Also, plainly: a hip and a balance and something in the chest are things a doctor should hear about this week. Telling one is not surrender. It is very often exactly what God is doing.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a warm thought and cold tea. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a man has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Spoken. Not chewed over at a kitchen table. And the thing in the way is not Kev, who was decent about it, and it is not the ladder. It is a sentence: now somebody has to do it for me. Nobody has ever answered that out loud, and you least of all.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a man with any authority at his own kitchen table. Scripture gives the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how much strength was behind them.

If this morning has taken you somewhere darker than embarrassment, and there are hours when you would rather not be here at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.