He Was The Steady One Until He Was Not

There is a role a person can get put in without ever agreeing to it, and he had it for about eleven years.

He was the one who did not panic. He was the one people looked at when something went wrong, to see how bad it was, because his face was the instrument everybody used and he knew that and he kept the instrument steady.

He was good at it. He is not falsely modest about that.

And then there was an afternoon, at the end of a long stretch that had a great deal in it, when something not especially large happened and he came apart in front of six people.

Not shouting. Worse than shouting, in a way. He stopped being able to speak properly, and he had to sit down, and he could not stop, and somebody put a hand on his back, and it went on for a while.

They were unbelievably good about it. Every one of them. He has never had a moment's coldness from any of them since, and one of them has been better to him in the two years since than in the nine before.

And he has spent those two years managing himself.

That is the only word for it. He watches his own reserves the way a man watches a gauge. He leaves things early. He has a set of small internal instruments running at all times, checking, and he is very careful now, and he is never in a room at the point where he might not have anything left.

Nobody knows this. He looks like a man who has become sensible about his limits, and there is a version of it that is exactly that, and he tells himself that version.

But underneath it is not sensible. It is a permanent guard, and the thing it is guarding against is not exhaustion.

It is that six people saw him without the instrument working, and he cannot make himself believe they still see the same man, however they behave.

And you have an afternoon like that. You were the steady one and then you were not, in front of people, and you have been running a private management system ever since.

What heaven sent to the prophet under the tree

There is a passage in First Kings that everybody should know and very few people have read slowly.

Elijah has just come off the largest public day of his life. Fire from heaven, a nation turning, the whole of it. And then a threat arrives, and he runs a day into the wilderness, and he sits down under a broom tree and asks God to take his life.

He says: it is enough now, take away my life, for I am no better than my fathers.

That is a man at the absolute end of himself, saying so, out loud, immediately after the greatest thing he has ever been part of.

And here is what happens next.

And he lay down and slept under a broom tree. And behold, an angel touched him and said to him, "Arise and eat."1 Kings 19:5

Sleep. Then food. Then more sleep and more food, and only much later, several verses on, a conversation.

No rebuke. No sermon. No suggestion that a man of his standing should not be saying such things, and no correction of the theology in what he had said, which was in fact wrong.

You were met with bread rather than with a verdict, and that has been the pattern since long before your afternoon. It is written that an angel touched him and said, arise and eat (1 Kings 19:5), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an ancient meal under a tree into something a man can feel in his own body two years after coming apart in front of six people.

Now the managing, because that is the whole of your life now.

Look at what it is actually for. It is not for your health, though it wears health's clothes and passes easily. It is a system built to guarantee that six people never see that again, and its real object is not exhaustion, it is exposure.

And it is exhausting in itself. Running instruments all day costs more than most people's actual work, and nobody knows you are doing it, which means nobody can help.

You are permitted to stop guarding, and the guarding has been costing you more than the thing it guards against. Scripture says come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest (Matthew 11:28), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes rest an actual event rather than a topic, which is what an angel did with a loaf and a jar of water.

And the thing you cannot make yourself believe.

However they behave, they cannot see the same man.

Consider the evidence you have and have not used. Two years of nobody being cold. One of them being better to you since than before. That is not people managing an awkwardness. Awkwardness fades; that man has moved toward you, and people do not move toward somebody they have downgraded.

You have two years of evidence that the room did not reclassify you, and you have not admitted a single day of it. It is written that love covers a multitude of sins (1 Peter 4:8), and this was not even a sin, and it is the Holy Spirit who put that love in six people on an afternoon when the instrument everybody used had stopped working.

And one more thing, about what they actually saw.

They did not see the real you emerge. They saw a man who had carried a role for eleven years reach the end of what a human being carries, in public, which is not a revelation about his character, it is arithmetic.

You reached the end of what a person carries, and there is no shame anywhere in that. Scripture says we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us (2 Corinthians 4:7), and it is His Spirit who is the power in the jar, which has never once depended on the jar not cracking.