Power at the Bottom
Eastertide 2025
When you feel your worst, you also feel like you have no power. When you are sick, when you’re a patient in the ED at the mercy of the staff who are trying to triage and prioritize patients’ needs, you can’t do anything but wait your turn. When you are spent, exhausted, and out of ideas, you can’t do anything but rest. When it feels like everything is going wrong no matter your best efforts or intentions, all you can do is watch it crash and burn. Sometimes you can do everything right, and it still all goes wrong.
The question is always, then what? After you’re discharged, after you’ve slept, after you’ve witnessed everything fall apart, then what?
In the 2016 animated movie “Sing,” Buster Moon’s grand plans for a theater are literally washed out, costing him not only all his financial resources and reputation, but also his home. He moves in with his best friend and spends some time moping. Then, Buster sees the bucket his father started out with when his father had nothing and resumes his father’s car washing business. The phrase that Buster repeats is that “When you've reached rock bottom, there's only one way to go, and that's up!”
This is the irony about being in the valley, whether it’s a financial valley or the valley of the shadow of death. The valley is where the power is. I’ve explored valley theology before (see here), and it’s worth continuing. We view the mountaintop with rose-colored glasses and idolize it and think that’s where we want to be instead of wherever we are. But life isn’t lived on the mountaintop. Life is lived in the trenches, in the valleys and dips of life. The power isn’t on top of the mountain. And it’s not when everything is going right. (Does that ever even happen??)
Think of water coming down the mountain. It’s slow-moving at the top. There’s no power in this water. It’s just a trickle that becomes a stream, that gradually becomes more the more it flows downhill. The trickle can’t do much, but the force of the water at the bottom can move a waterwheel or power electricity. That’s how hydroelectric power works – it's the water at the bottom that has the force to create electricity, not the water at the top.
So, when you find yourself at the bottom, after you’ve crashed and burned, after it all falls apart, when you’re ready to look around again, know that you have more power at the bottom than you do at the top.