Sleeves Rolled Twice

The coat was her grandmother's and it has never once fit her, and that has never once stopped her putting it on.

Five in the morning. Hard freeze, the kind where the yard light makes everything look like it has been dipped in something. She takes the coat off the nail by the back door the way she has taken it off that nail for eleven years, and she rolls the right sleeve twice and the left sleeve twice, because her grandmother was a bigger woman than she is and the cuffs come past her fingers otherwise.

Then out. The latch is cold enough to bite. The gravel is that particular ringing hard. She goes down to the trough with the heel of her boot already deciding where it is going to come down on the ice, because the ice will be four inches thick at the edge and thin in the middle and she has known that about this trough since she was nineteen.

She breaks it. She stands there a second while the water comes up black and the animals start moving toward her out of the dark. Her breath goes up in the yard light.

And what she is thinking, standing there, is not spiritual. What she is thinking is: nobody asked me. She is thinking about her brother, who is three hours away and calls on Sundays. She is thinking that she does not remember agreeing to be the one who does this, and that she cannot now work out when it became hers, and that if she stopped tomorrow the whole thing would go down inside a week and everybody would be very surprised.

And underneath that, quieter, the thing she has never said out loud to another human being in eleven years: I am not big enough for this coat. I never was. I have been going out in something cut for somebody else my whole life.

That is you, and you know it is, whatever your five in the morning looks like.

You are wearing something too big. A responsibility, a role, a name, a family that got handed to you sideways. And you go out in it anyway, because there is nobody else to do it, and because you would rather be too small for the coat than let the trough freeze over.

Before anything else, two plain things. If your version of this has somebody in it who frightens you or hurts you, none of this is telling you to stand there and take it; tell one person today who can act. And whatever this fight is, it is not a person. Not your brother who calls on Sundays. Not the one who left it to you. Scripture is flat about it: the struggle is not against flesh and blood, and that is a mercy, because it means you can stop losing to somebody you also love.

Where the strength in that psalm actually comes from

David wrote a long song about being rescued, and in the middle of it he says a thing about strength that most people read too fast.

It is God that girdeth me with strength, and maketh my way perfect.Psalm 18:32

Girdeth. It is an old word for a plain act: it means somebody else fastened the belt. In that world you did not gird yourself for the work; a belt was long and it went around and it was pulled tight, and often as not another pair of hands did it, because it is hard to pull a belt properly tight on your own body.

So the picture in the verse is not a man finding strength inside himself. It is a man standing still while God buckles something around him. He is the one being dressed.

You are girded, and the hands doing the girding have never been yours. That is not sentiment for a cold morning: Psalm 18:32 puts God as the subject of the sentence and the man as the object, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a fastened thing hold on a real woman at five in the morning rather than the amount of grit she can find at the nail by the door.

Now read the second half, because that is where the relief is. Maketh my way perfect. Not makes me perfect. Makes the way. He is not standing over you assessing whether you have grown into the coat. He is out ahead of you making the ground you are about to cross into something you can cross.

The coat was cut for the work, not for the wearer

Here is what eleven years of sleeves rolled twice has taught you wrongly, and it is worth pulling out into the light.

Somewhere in eleven winters the conclusion set itself: the coat does not fit, so the wrong woman must be wearing it. That is an honest conclusion and it is upside down. A coat cut for the cold is cut for the cold. It is not cut for the arms. Her grandmother's coat kept her grandmother alive in that yard, and it is keeping this woman alive in that yard, and the fact that four inches of cuff hangs past her fingers is a fact about her wrists and not a verdict on her calling.

The armor in Ephesians works exactly the same way. It is described as the whole armour of God, and of God is the load-bearing part of that phrase. It is His. It is sized to what it has to stop, not to the person standing inside it. Nobody in that passage is asked to grow into it first.

You have been wearing something cut for the work and calling it a coat you failed to fill. The written word calls the armor God's own and never once measures a believer against it, and His Spirit is the one keeping it on a person who has spent a decade feeling small in it.

And I am not going to hand you a technique for feeling bigger. There is no procedure here. If there were one you could perform it wrong, and the moment a thing can be got wrong the whole weight of the outcome slides back onto the person doing it, which is where it has sat on you since you were nineteen and where it does not belong.

You are held up by something you did not fasten, this morning, with the latch still cold in your hand. Psalm 18:32 says God girds and God makes the way, and the Spirit of God is what makes that a fact in a body rather than a line in a hymn.