They Shall Walk and Not Faint Is the Last and Smallest Promise

The thing about being the slowest person in a group is that nobody says anything, and that is the whole problem.

They wait. They stop and look at something they were not interested in. Somebody has a sudden need to check their phone. A conversation gets started at the exact moment you fall behind, and it is a kind conversation, and it is being had at that moment for one reason.

And you know. Every single time, you know.

I got very good at reading the back of a group in the year after my leg, and I want to say plainly that I was never once resented by anybody. Not one of those people has ever made me feel like a burden. That is not where the damage comes from.

The damage comes from being the reason a thing takes longer. That is a specific weight and it does not respond to reassurance, because reassurance is exactly the thing that confirms it.

There is a verse everybody knows about eagles, and the part of it I actually need is the last clause, which nobody quotes.

Read the order of the three

Here is the verse.

But they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint. (Isaiah 40:31, King James Version)

Three promises. Mount up. Run. Walk.

Every instinct says that is backwards. A person building a list to impress somebody would start with walking and build to flying. Isaiah does the opposite: he starts at the most spectacular and ends at the most ordinary.

Which tells you where the emphasis is. In Hebrew writing, the last item in a list is often the weight of it, and the last item here is walking without fainting.

That is not an anticlimax. That is the promise for the longest and least visible stretch of a life, and Isaiah puts it in the position of most importance because he knows which one people actually need.

You have the last promise on that list and it was put last on purpose. Isaiah 40:31 ends on they shall walk, and not faint. It is the same Spirit, Ephesians 3:16 strengthening with might in the inner man, who supplies the strength that ordinary walking asks for.

The verse two lines earlier says who it is for

If a person wonders whether that promise is for the strong, the verse just before it settles the question.

He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. (Isaiah 40:29)

To the faint. To them that have no might. The recipients are named, and they are not the capable.

And the chapter goes on to say something startling in the next verse: even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall. The strong are explicitly included in the failing, and the promise is explicitly aimed at the ones who have already got there.

So the promise is not aimed at the front of the group. It is aimed at the back of it, by name.

You are named in that verse as the recipient rather than the exception. Isaiah 40:29 says he giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength. It is the Spirit of God, Romans 8:26 helping our infirmities, who is described as helping precisely where there is no might.

Jacob asks for the pace of the slowest

There is a scene in Genesis that I have never heard preached and that says more about this than anything else I know.

Jacob is reunited with Esau, and Esau wants to travel together and lead the way. And Jacob says this:

Let my lord, I pray thee, pass over before his servant: and I will lead on softly, according as the cattle that goeth before me and the children be able to endure. (Genesis 33:14)

I will lead on softly. The Hebrew is closer to gently, at an easy pace.

And notice what sets the pace: the young animals and the children, which is to say the slowest members of the party. Jacob organizes an entire caravan around the endurance of the least capable, and he says it out loud to a man who could have moved faster.

Nobody in that passage treats it as a concession. It is simply how a group with children in it moves.

You are the pace of the group rather than a drag on it, and Genesis describes that as ordinary. Genesis 33:14 sets the speed by what the children be able to endure, and it is His Spirit, Galatians 5:22 naming gentleness among His fruit, who supplies the softness that a party needs to move that way.

Even the shepherd makes them lie down

There is a line in the twenty third psalm that people read as scenery and that is actually about pace.

He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters. (Psalm 23:2)

He maketh me to lie down. The verb is causative. The sheep is not lying down on its own initiative; the shepherd is arranging it.

Which means the stopping is not a failure in the system, it is the system. A shepherd who kept a flock moving at the speed of the strongest animal would arrive with a smaller flock.

Jesus does the same thing with people, and gives the most practical reason imaginable:

Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while: for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat. (Mark 6:31)

Notice He does not ask whether they have earned it, and He does not tell them to keep up.

You are being made to lie down by Somebody who arranges the pace on purpose. Psalm 23:2 uses a causative verb about the resting. It is the Holy Spirit, Galatians 5:22 naming peace among His fruit, who supplies rest that a person will not schedule for themselves.

And if being the slow one has begun to work on you at night in a way that is bigger than the walking, say it out loud to a person: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, or the 988 crisis line, which answers every hour there is. Feeling like the reason a thing takes longer is a particular kind of loneliness and it should not be carried in silence.