Berksblog

The meal delivery arrived at six. The flowers had come that morning, already arranged, already paid for. Her phone kept lighting up on the table beside her. Sweet things like these: praying for you, thinking of you, let me know what you need. None of it was false. None of it was wasted. When the house went quiet again, the food was still warm and the flowers were still standing, and the person who had always been in the chair across from her was still gone.

Sending has less friction these days.

That’s not really an argument against the sending. Paul wrote letters when he could not travel. John was no stranger to a pen either: a Gospel, three letters, a vision no one has fully unpacked since. But near the end of one of those short letters, John admits something almost embarrassing for someone who wrote that much: “Though I have much to write to you, I would rather not use paper and ink. Instead I hope to come to you and talk face to face, so that our joy may be complete” (2 John 12, ESV). He is not confessing that the letter failed. He is naming its ceiling. Something in a friendship will not travel through paper, however well the paper is written.

Paul gives us the fuller picture. Writing to the church at Thessalonica, he says: “So, being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us” (1 Thessalonians 2:8, ESV). Notice its two objects. The gospel of God. And our own selves. Paul did not choose between truth and presence, sending one and keeping back the other. He handed over both, and the second gift is the one no courier can carry for him.

We tend to automate some of the effort of caring because technology has made it extremely easy, and that’s not usually about hiding from guilt when we let an app stand in for a visit. Most days it’s simpler than that: we’re tired, or unsure what to say, or genuinely stretched past what one person can give in a week. That much is honest, and it deserves to be treated honestly. But underneath the fatigue there is often a quieter arithmetic running: if the message went out, the debt is paid, and the evening is ours again.

Jesus told a story about that arithmetic once, though the man in it never touches a phone. A priest had somewhere to be. A Levite had somewhere to be. Then: “But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him” (Luke 10:33–34, ESV). Every verb in that sentence has a body attached to it.

This is what a phone was never built to carry: the presence of a hand that closes firmly around another hand. Arms that actually surround someone, not a message that only says they are surrounded. Eyes meeting eyes long enough for something true to pass between them. A voice, not a notification, saying soft, comforting words a screen can display but never speak.

Calling for help now might be wiser than personally lifting a stranger onto a donkey. Wisdom was never all that opposed to a faster tool. The question the parable actually asks is narrower than that, and harder to answer: did the need reach far enough to bend your schedule, or only far enough to reach your contacts list?

Some days the honest answer is that it didn’t reach far enough. Sometimes that’s just a limit — a person only has so much reach in a day. And sometimes, if we’re honest, love actually fails. Christ carried what no one else could, including the times our love falls short of what we meant it to be.

That’s what the Incarnation actually is: not merely a message about God’s presence, but God’s presence itself. “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14, ESV). God did not send flowers ahead of himself. He came and stayed.

So is the answer to put the phone down and show up for every hurting person who crosses your path? It is not, and calling it obedience would only be a different kind of exhaustion that has learned to dress for church. Paul could give himself away because he was never the source of what he was giving: “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19, ESV). Grace does not excuse us from carrying one another’s burdens. It frees us from believing we must carry what only Christ can. We are servants at the empty chair, not the Savior who can fill it.

Somewhere tonight a phone is lighting up on a table. The message on it is true. The flowers are real. The meal is warm.

None of that can answer the one question that matters tonight: is there a chair, in a house you could actually reach, still waiting on the gift Paul once called our own selves.

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Scripture references: 2 John 12 · 1 Thessalonians 2:8 · Luke 10:33–34 · John 1:14 · 1 John 4:19 (all ESV)

Some mornings you say the true thing without meaning to. My wife and I were walking out the door—snack bags, the life-size doll, forgetting the juice boxes, diaper logistics—and she said it plainly: everything feels like a struggle right now. Nothing dramatic. Just the ordinary weight of getting a family fed, dressed, and moving, five days a week, for years.

There’s a feeling that goes with that kind of morning, even when nothing has actually gone wrong. Call it wilderness. Not sand and manna. A lengthy pickup line, a grocery budget, a body that’s tired before the day has started.

Paul had a name for it too, and he wasn’t reaching for a metaphor. The warning part of the passage is sharp—”take heed lest he fall”—and we need that caution. But the passage’s strength is what comes next. Writing to a church far removed from Sinai, he pointed back at Israel’s forty years and told the Corinthians plainly what that history was for:

“Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come. Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall. No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.” (1 Corinthians 10:11–13, ESV)

Paul doesn’t call the wilderness a punishment. He calls it an example, recorded on purpose so a Corinthian church, and a kitchen table somewhere else entirely, would recognize their own temptation inside someone else’s forty years. The struggle at the door isn’t proof God has stepped back. It’s the territory every believer has always walked, and Paul stitches two promises into one sentence about it: God is faithful, and He provides the way out. Not around it. Through a door that opens while you’re still standing in the pressure.

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable, because the temptation Paul names isn’t just exhaustion. Exhaustion only opens a door. What walks through it is the real question.

I’ll be honest about mine. On the tired mornings, behind schedule, I catch myself looking at people who seem to have it figured out: the recognition, the resolved-looking life, the ease. And something in me asks why I don’t have that. Not out loud. Not admitted, most days, even to myself. But it’s there, and it’s older than this particular morning.

That question has a history longer than mine. Satan asked a version of it to Jesus, on a mountain, after forty days without food—a depletion far more severe than mine at the end of a hard week:

“Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to him, ‘All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.'” (Matthew 4:8–9, ESV)

He didn’t invent comparison for the tired and the ordinary. He used it on the Son of God at His most depleted. Which means the version that visits a parent at pickup line, measuring somebody else’s apparent ease against your own struggle, carries an echo of the same offer, sized down to fit an ordinary morning’s errand list. See what they have. Wonder why you don’t. That wondering isn’t the sin yet. It’s the door.

So the question this morning isn’t whether you get tired. Paul already told you that part is common to man. What are you tempted to bow toward, when you are?

Jesus answered the mountain with a refusal, not a negotiation:

“Then Jesus said to him, ‘Be gone, Satan! For it is written, “You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.”‘” (Matthew 4:10, ESV)

That’s the way of escape Paul promised—and that’s what it looks like when you take it. Worship rightly placed. Jesus didn’t negotiate with the offer. He turned it down by pointing upward. Scripture says He was “obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8, ESV). The obedience that started on a mountain with bread and kingdoms held all the way to a cross. Ours is only asked to hold through considerably smaller mountains: a hard morning, a comparison, a wondering that wants to grow into a grievance.

I prayed something true about this before I ever thought to write it down, that I’m horizontally placed in this life: errands, deadlines, a family that needs me, a local congregation that depends on me. Ground level. But that my heart would stay vertical, oriented up instead of sideways at what somebody else seems to have. The struggle at the door doesn’t disappear because the heart turns. The wondering does start to lose its grip, though. One honest look upward at a time.

HEB