I Can Do Hard Things And Not This One

Adaeze runs a department of nineteen people, and last year she took it through a restructure that ended two roles, and she did it well, and both of those people still text her at Christmas.

She has stood up in front of a board and said a number they did not want to hear. She has told a supplier no four times in one call. She once got a delivery rerouted across two states in ninety minutes on a Sunday, from her kitchen, in a bathrobe.

She cannot open the hood of her own car.

And she does not mean she has not got round to it. She means she has stood in front of it, twice, with time on her hands and nobody watching, and found that her hand did not go to the lever.

Now, this makes no sense on its face, and Adaeze knows it makes no sense, and the not making sense is a large part of what has kept her from telling anybody.

Because there is no story here. There was no incident. Nobody laughed at her. Her father was fine about cars and would have shown her anything. She just never learned, and at some point the never-learned became a small closed room, and now it is thirty eight years old and she is a woman who does hard things for a living standing in a driveway unable to pull a lever.

And here is the thing she does with that, which is the actual problem.

She lets it mean something.

Because a woman who can do everything else and cannot do this concludes, somewhere below the level of words, that the wall is not about cars. That there is something underneath the competence. That if it were really there all the way down, it would be there in the driveway too.

Her friend, who does know her, said in the spring, "You negotiated with a landlord in a second language. You can open a hood."

And Adaeze said, "It's different."

And her friend said, "Why?"

And Adaeze said, "I don't know," and it was the truest thing she said all week.

The wall is a room, not a foundation

Let me put down what I am not doing, so nothing has to brace.

I am not going to explain anybody's car to them from here. And I am not going to tell a competent woman that she is being silly, because she has already said that to herself in far better words than mine and it has not helped once.

What I want to take apart is the conclusion, because the conclusion is the load bearing thing and it is false.

Here is the verse.

For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.2 Timothy 1:7

Now, that is usually preached as an encouragement, and it is one. But look at what kind of sentence it actually is.

It is an inventory.

Paul is not telling Timothy to feel braver. He is telling him what was issued. Power, love, and a sound mind, given, in the past, already in the man's possession, and he is naming them precisely because Timothy at that moment was not feeling any of them.

And that matters enormously here, because it separates two things that get confused constantly: what a person feels in a driveway, and what a person has been given.

A wall in front of a hood is a feeling in a place. It is real and it is stubborn and it stops a hand moving. What it is not, and cannot be, is evidence about the inventory.

You are not a woman with something missing underneath, and Scripture treats what was given as an inventory rather than as a description of how anybody feels on a Tuesday. It is written that God has not given us the spirit of fear but of power and of love and of a sound mind, which reports what was issued rather than what is being experienced, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a fact you can stand on in a driveway.

You have been carrying the whole inventory the entire time, including in front of that car. 2 Timothy 1 puts the giving in the past tense and leaves nothing conditional on the recipient's confidence, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that permanence steadier than a feeling in a driveway.

Why the small one is the hard one

Here is something I want you to have, because it explains the thing that makes no sense.

The restructure was hard and you did it. The board was hard and you did it. The landlord in a second language was hard and you did it.

Every single one of those had two things this does not have.

The first is that they were unavoidable. Somebody was waiting. A meeting was in a calendar. A person was on a phone. There was no version of the day where you did not do it.

The second is that every one of them was your own ground. Twenty years of standing in rooms like those, knowing how you sound in them and how to recover when it goes badly.

A hood in a driveway on a Saturday has neither. Nobody is waiting. Nothing collapses if it does not happen today. And it is not your ground, because nobody has ever stood there.

So the wall is not a wall of fear standing against your competence. It is the entirely ordinary combination of a thing that has no deadline and a room you have never been in. Anybody would stall on that. Most people are stalling on something exactly like it right now.

You were never failing at a small thing while succeeding at large ones, and no verse anywhere ranks a person by the size of what they can do. 2 Timothy 1 names the given things without attaching any of them to a task list, and the Spirit of God is what keeps a driveway from becoming a verdict.

And here is the practical piece, and it is small on purpose.

Give it a deadline and give it a room. That is all that is missing. Sixty seconds, tonight, with a timer, alone. Not to learn anything. Not to check anything. To stand in front of an open hood for sixty seconds so that it becomes a room a person has been in.

You have permission to make this small enough to actually happen, and Scripture never once required a person to begin at full size. It is written that who has despised the day of small things, which is Zechariah 4 with God standing up for a beginning that looks like nothing, and His Spirit is what makes sixty seconds a real thing rather than a token one.