The Ladder Fell Down and I Found the Wasp Nest

There is a particular sound a ladder makes when it goes over while you are not on it, and it is a much better sound than the other one.

I was going up into the hayloft to shift the last of the small bales forward, which is a job I have done maybe four thousand times, and I was one rung off the floor when Bucky came through the barn door at the speed he uses for entering rooms. He did not aim at the ladder. I want to be fair to him. He was aiming at nothing at all, which is the way he aims at everything, and the ladder was simply in the shortest line between him and somewhere else.

So I stepped off and the ladder went sideways and clattered down along the wall, and I stood there on the barn floor with my hands out saying words about goats.

And then, because there was nothing else to do while Toby fetched the other ladder, I looked up.

The wasp nest was under the loft lip, tucked in the shadow, about the size of a football and gray as an old shirt. From the top of the ladder I would have been face height with it and would not have seen it, because you do not look back and down when you are getting onto a loft floor. From the barn floor, forty feet back, it was as obvious as a hat.

I do not enjoy telling this story, which is why Toby tells it constantly.

We dealt with the nest in the evening the careful way, and nobody got stung, and the loft got shifted the next morning. But I have thought about it more than the size of the event deserves, because I have spent a very long time asking God to make me a man who does not need the ladder knocked out from under him.

Paul asked three times and did not get what he asked for

There is a passage where a strong man asks God for the sensible thing, repeatedly, and is told no.

He does not tell us what the thorn was. Generations have guessed and the guesses do not matter, because the point of the passage is not the ailment, it is the answer:

And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. (2 Corinthians 12:9)

Read what God does not say. He does not say the thorn is good. He does not say Paul should be grateful for it, and He does not explain it. He says something about Himself instead, which is what He does almost every single time somebody asks Him a question about their own capacity.

You have not been handed a God who requires you to be adequate first. That is 2 Corinthians 12 word for word, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than a good attitude who makes a sentence like that carry any weight in a barn on a Tuesday.

And then Paul says the thing that sounds mad until it has happened to you: most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.

You were never the load bearing wall in this. The written word says the strength is made perfect in weakness rather than in spite of it, and the Spirit of God is what makes that read as relief instead of as consolation.

The arithmetic runs the other way

Here is what a man does with a verse like that when he is fifty and tired: he tries to turn it into a strategy. If weakness is the doorway, then a man sets out to be strategically weak. That does not work and it is not what is being described.

What is being described is a God who does not wait for the ladder to be steady.

It happens everywhere in Scripture once you notice it. Gideon's army gets smaller on purpose. Moses says he cannot speak and God does not give him eloquence, He gives him Aaron and a promise about mouths. A boy brings five loaves that are not enough and Scripture is careful to record that they were not enough.

And the LORD said unto him, Who hath made man's mouth? or who maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind? have not I the LORD? (Exodus 4:11)

That is an uncomfortable verse and it is meant to be. God is claiming responsibility for the shape of the person He is sending, which means the shape is not an accident He is working around.

You are not a rough draft God is putting up with until the good version arrives. Exodus 4:11 puts the making of the man on God rather than on chance, and it is His Spirit who lets that be heard as belonging instead of as a verdict.

You have already been chosen in the exact condition you are in. Nothing in 2 Corinthians 12 is conditional on improvement, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from a fact on a page to a fact in a chest.