I’ve Got Nothing Left to Give

This is the one you actually came here about.

The rest of it, the failures and the record and the marriage, all of that is the reason you left. This is the reason you haven’t come back. Because somewhere in the last decade you sat down and did an honest inventory of what you have remaining to offer anybody, and the number came back low, and you have not been able to argue with it since.

I want to tell you something about that number before we go anywhere.

You’re not wrong.

Everybody in your life keeps telling you that you’re being too hard on yourself, and it never helps, and here’s why. You know the arithmetic better than they do. You’ve run it more times. You’re not depressed about your resources, you’re informed about them, and being told to cheer up by somebody who hasn’t done the math is insulting.

And there’s a reason the number came back low, and it isn’t age and it isn’t character.

You are carrying two households that are not yours.

Your mother is eighty-six and she is not dying quickly. She is dying over four years, in pieces, and every one of those pieces is a phone call at an inconvenient hour, a decision nobody wants to make, and a form somebody has to sign. You are the one who signs it. Your father went the same way, or he went fast, and you’re not sure which was worse.

And your son is thirty-six and something didn’t launch. The money, or the marriage, or the thing he doesn’t talk about, and the grandbaby is in the middle of it. He calls when it’s bad. You answer every time, because what else would you do.

Nobody planned for both at once. Your parents didn’t have this. Their parents died at seventy in about a week, and their kids were gone at twenty-two and stayed gone. You are in the first generation being squeezed from both ends for a decade at a stretch, there is no word for the job, and nobody is counting the hours.

So when you sit down and total up what you have left to offer, the number is low, and the number is accurate. You have been spending it. You just haven’t been spending it on anything anybody writes down.

That’s not depletion from a character flaw. That’s depletion from load.

So let’s not do that. Let’s go find the man in this story who ran the same numbers and got them right.

There’s a crowd on a hillside. Thousands of people, and nobody has raised a problem yet.

When Jesus looked up and saw a great crowd coming toward him, he said to Philip, “Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?”

He asked Philip. By name. Out of everybody standing there.

And John, who cannot help himself, adds a note in the margin: He asked this only to test him, for he already had in mind what he was going to do.

So the question was never a request for information. Jesus knew what was about to happen. The question was aimed at Philip, personally, to show Philip something about Philip.

Hold that, because it means what comes next isn’t a mistake he made. It’s a diagnosis he received.

Philip answered him, “It would take more than half a year’s wages to buy enough bread for each one to have a bite!”

Look at what he actually did there.

He didn’t panic. He didn’t say something spiritual. He didn’t deflect.

He ran the numbers. He estimated the crowd, estimated the cost per person, multiplied it out, and reported a figure. Two hundred denarii, which is two hundred days of a laborer’s pay, call it eight months of actual working days. And that only gets everybody a bite.

And he was right.

That’s the part I need you to sit in. Nobody in the story corrects his math. Nobody says actually, Philip, it’s cheaper than you think. The number was accurate. Bread cost what bread cost. There were as many people as there were. His arithmetic was clean and his conclusion followed from it and the conclusion was no.

Philip was not a faithless man. He was an accurate one.

Then Andrew, who we’ll get to at the end of this book, speaks up with something almost embarrassing.

Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish.

Barley. Not wheat. Barley bread was what you ate when you couldn’t afford the other kind. This is a poor kid’s lunch, and there’s not much of it, and Andrew knows how it sounds because he says so in the same breath.

But how far will they go among so many?

Even the man who brought it up doesn’t believe in it.

So now you’ve got two accurate assessments on the table. Philip’s says we can’t buy enough. Andrew’s says what we have isn’t enough. Both true. Both careful. Both from men who were paying attention.

And then everybody eats, and there are twelve baskets left over.

Here’s the whole chapter in one line, and I want to be precise about it because the sloppy version of this has been used to beat people like you for years.

Philip’s math was right. His inventory was incomplete.

He counted the money. He counted the crowd. He counted the distance to the nearest town and the price of bread when he got there.

He did not count the person who asked him the question.

That is not a failure of faith in the way people usually mean it, like he didn’t believe hard enough. It’s simpler and more human than that. He was standing next to Jesus and he left Jesus out of the total, because when you’re doing serious arithmetic you count the things you know how to count.

You’ve done the same thing and you’ve done it carefully.

Here’s what I’ve got. Sixty-one years old, bad knees, a work history with a hole in it, a family that’s civil at best, no standing anywhere, no energy after four in the afternoon, and a reputation in this town I’d rather not test.

Every line of that is true. You’re not exaggerating and you’re not fishing. That is a real inventory taken by a serious person.

It’s also missing the same line Philip’s was missing.

Now let me tell you the thing that actually turns this chapter, because it’s not what you’d guess.

The problem got solved by a kid’s sack lunch.

Not by finding the money. Not by Philip’s number turning out to be wrong. Not by a wealthy person in the crowd stepping up. The resource that fed the whole hillside was the least impressive thing anybody produced all day, and it belonged to somebody nobody would have asked.

Whatever you have left, it’s more than five barley rolls and a couple of dried fish.

I’m serious. Take your worst honest inventory, the one from the paragraph above, and set it next to a poor child’s lunch, and tell me which one you’d rather be holding.

The size of what you bring has never once been the operative variable in any of these stories. It wasn’t for the boy. It wasn’t for the widow with two coins. The arithmetic has never once come out in anybody’s favor, and the arithmetic not coming out is apparently not the obstacle everyone assumes it is.

One more thing, and it’s the detail that stays with me.

Twelve baskets left over.

There was more at the end than there was at the beginning. And somebody had to carry those baskets, and the men doing the carrying included the two who had just finished explaining why it couldn’t be done.

I’d like to have seen Philip’s face.

Here’s your move, and it’s the only one in this book that takes a pen and more than five minutes.

Do the inventory again. Properly this time.

You’ve done the liabilities. You’ve done them a thousand times, in the dark, in detail. That side of the ledger is fully audited and I’m not asking you to revisit it.

Do the other side. And do it the way you’d do it for somebody else, because you’d be fair to somebody else.

What do you actually know how to do. Not professionally. Actually. What can you fix, drive, build, cook, calculate, carry, sit through.

Who trusts you. Anybody. Even one. Especially the ones you’d discount because they’re not important.

What have you lived through that most people in a room have not.

Who calls you when something goes wrong, and why do they call you and not somebody else.

What do you know now that you’d have paid real money for at thirty-five.

That last one is the whole third part of this book, so give it a minute.

Write it down and don’t argue with the entries while you’re writing them. You’ll want to. You’ll write I’m good with my hands and immediately add but nobody needs that anymore, and I’m asking you not to. Get the list first. Argue tomorrow.

Then look at what’s on the page.

It is not enough. Of course it isn’t. It’s five barley loaves and it was never going to be enough, and Philip was right and Andrew was right and neither of them was wrong about a single number.

That’s not the disqualification you’ve been treating it as.

It’s just the starting inventory.