Clothed With Power
The Mantle Series, Week Three
Some weeks remind you that purpose may be the flame, but the mantle still has weight.
This essay should have been finished already. In my mind, Week 3 was supposed to be polished and waiting. But life did what life does. The week stretched itself across my back. Responsibilities called my name. Interview Prep had its own demands. The body asked for attention. The mind needed room. And still, Wednesday came.
Today I am writing from where I actually am. The desk is not arranged. The mind is not quiet. The assignment is still open in front of me, and the week has not fully left my body yet.
Mantle is not carried only in beautiful conditions, only when the calendar behaves, or when every emotion has been nearly folded and put away. Sometimes it is carried while you are tired, while you are still catching your breath, while you are asking GOD for the strength to do what you know you have been called to do.
Which is why Luke 24:49 has been sitting with me so strongly.
JESUS tells HIS disciples: I am going to send you what my Father has promised; but stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.
Clothed with power. Not decorated. Not admired for it. Clothed, covered, wrapped in what they would need before stepping into what they were assigned to carry.
That keeps working on me because the disciples already had proximity to JESUS. They had walked with HIM through correction and love, heard HIS teaching, and watched HIM work. They had purpose and living testimony both.
And still, JESUS told them to wait.
Once we know we are called, we want movement. Once we understand the assignment, we want the next instruction to go. JESUS did not say first. HE said wait until you are clothed.
Purpose alone does not mean you are ready to carry the mantle in your own strength. What the assignment requires is power and steadiness, and those do not simply materialize on command just because the calling is real.
This is where many of us get into trouble. We try to carry a mantle on fumes, lead from exhaustion, serve from depletion. We speak from injury and call it authority. A mantle was never meant to be carried by performance alone.
The power JESUS described steadies you before it sends you. It gives you language when your emotions are loud. It teaches you when to speak, when to pause, when to build, when to leave, and when to stand still. Power from on high is not ego with a Bible verse attached. It is the capacity to carry what GOD has placed on you without letting the weight deform you.
This matters particularly for Black women.
We know how to carry rooms, families, and the unfinished labor of broken systems. We know how to produce while tired, smile while calculating what is still unpaid, be called strong while nobody asks who is strengthening us. We have been trained to push through, and pushing through has kept us alive through seasons that had no business lasting as long as they did.
Mantle is not being everybody’s mule, and it is not being praised for surviving what should have been shared, corrected, funded or repaired. Without power and discernment, the assignment gets tangled up with overfunctioning, and strength gets mistaken for an invitation to take more than you offered.
When you are clothed with power, you start to recognize that GOD can call you without requiring you to disappear. You stop confusing pressure with purpose. You start asking the question that cuts through everything else: am I covered, or am I just busy?
Busy can imitate purpose for a while. It makes us feel needed. It keeps us from sitting with what is actually true. JESUS told the disciples to wait because the assignment was too important to carry without covering. Some things cannot be rushed into unprotected.
Survival kept me through certain seasons, and I will not dishonor it. It gets the children fed, the rent paid, the email sent, the interview taken, the tears wiped, and the day finished. Survival and power are not the same thing, though. Survival keeps you alive; power equips you to build. One says get through this. The other says you are being prepared for more than getting through.
I do not want to spend my remaining years only getting through.
There is a reason JESUS used the language of clothing. Clothing touches the body. It covers what is vulnerable. It identifies season and readiness. You do not wear the same thing to every assignment, and you cannot carry a winter assignment in summer clothing. Some of us have been underdressed for the terrain we are walking into, from not having waited long enough to be clothed.
Waiting is preparation. Sometimes it is GOD refusing to let you step into the weight of what is next without the power required to carry it well.
So yes, this essay is late. That is fitting. Week 3 was never supposed to demonstrate flawless execution. It was supposed to tell the truth: mantle requires more than my own strength. It requires power and covering, being clothed before being sent.
What GOD assigns, GOD equips. The mantle will feel heavy. The week will stretch. The work will cost you something real. You do not have to carry it uncovered, though. Once you are clothed, everything moves differently because you are no longer holding it alone.
Mantel Check
Where have you been carrying an assignment on your own strength, when GOD may be asking you to wait until you are clothed?
Sit with that before you answer.
Hustle & Poise|Germaine D. Bond