Isaiah 40:28–31 · Mark 1:35 · Luke 22:43 · Matthew 11:28–29

I didn’t catch his name.

Several weeks back I was in line at Burger King getting my coffee — the large, the same one I get every morning — and the young man behind the counter rang me up. I asked how he was doing. He said good. Said he was working a sixteen-hour shift.

I said, how do you do that?

He said, patience and energy.

And I walked back to my office with those two words and I have not been able to put them down since.

We treat patience like a sedative and energy like a stimulant — as if the goal is to calibrate the dose. Some of us are built to endure. We wait, we don’t spiral, we outlast things. But the drive is low. Others burn through at a rate that leaves patience in the dust. So we manage the deficit and call the arrangement maturity.

That young man didn’t say that. He put them together like they belonged together.

I think he was right.

Isaiah had seen something like this before. Not in a fast food joint, but in exile — in a people wrung out by Babylon, who had been waiting so long they had started to wonder if waiting was all there was. The prophet’s answer did not promise the exile would end on their schedule. It promised something else:

“Have you not known? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength. Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.” — Isaiah 40:28–31, ESV

The waiting is the mechanism of the energy. Not a prelude to it. The same transaction. And we have been trying to reverse it — most of us — running first and then wondering why there is nothing left for the long walk home.

I keep reflecting on that phrase — the same transaction. Because that’s what we don’t believe. We believe they’re sequential. First you build up the patience, then the energy arrives as the reward. Or first you burn through the energy, and then patience is what you practice while you recover. Either way, one feeds and the other follows. But Isaiah doesn’t describe a sequence. He describes a God who does not faint handing endurance to people who do — and the handing happens in the waiting, not after it. Maybe that’s why we keep running out. We’ve separated what was never meant to come apart.

But the point isn’t the theory. The point is that someone lived it.

Jesus understood this from inside a human frame that could actually be exhausted. Mark records what he did the morning after a day full of synagogue and crowds and healings, the whole town gathered at the door after sundown:

“And rising very early in the morning, while it was still dark, he departed and went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed.” — Mark 1:35, ESV

Before anyone else was moving. Dark. Alone. He was going to where the energy came from.

And in Gethsemane — at the point of maximum cost, the weight of what was coming pressing against the human will of the Son of God in a way no one can easily describe — Luke records what happened:

“And there appeared to him an angel from heaven, strengthening him.”— Luke 22:43, ESV

Not removing the cup. Strengthening him for the carrying of it. He received it the same way he always had — in prayer, in contact with the Father. Don’t expect to see an angel. But the God who strengthened him has already spoken to what he will do for us:

“fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.” — Isaiah 41:10, ESV

Same God. Same promise. Different side of the cross — and a better one.

Patience and energy. In that order.

The question is not whether you have enough of either one. Most of us already know we don’t. The question is whether you know the way back to where they come from — and whether you will go there before the running out, not after.

“Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”— Matthew 11:28–29, ESV

The rest he is offering is not the absence of the sixteen-hour shift. It is a different source for what the shift requires.

I didn’t catch his name. He had no idea he was describing something ancient, something the prophets named, something the Son of God modeled on his knees in the dark before sunrise.

But here is what he could not tell me — what only the text can say:

Where are you going when both run dry?

Scripture Chain: Isaiah 40:28–31 → Mark 1:35 → Luke 22:43 → Matthew 11:28–29

Herb Berkley