The One Everybody Brings It To

She has four things in her head this morning and none of them belong to her.

A marriage that is in real trouble and that nobody else in that building knows about. A young man whose situation she has not been able to stop thinking about since Tuesday. Somebody's diagnosis. Somebody's son.

She carries all of it well. That is the difficulty. She is discreet and she is warm and she remembers to follow up, and over about nine years the whole congregation has learned, without anybody deciding it, that she is where a thing goes when it is serious.

And there is nothing on the other side of that.

Not because people are unkind. If she said something, twenty of them would arrive at her door with food. But there is no mechanism, and a person who is known as the one who holds things is very hard to bring a thing to, and she has never once worked out how a person in her position would even begin.

She has her own week, of course. There is something in her own house at the moment that she has told nobody about.

And a woman she loves said on Sunday: we should fast for all of it as a church, and you should lead it.

She said that was a good idea. And what moved in her was not hope. It was the specific tiredness of somebody being handed the load again along with the request to organize it.

If you are the one everybody brings it to, come and sit down. Somebody has already put a plate in front of you.

Say the actual number out loud

Let us do something specific before any Scripture, because generalities will not touch this.

Count them. Not the whole nine years. This week. How many other people's worst situations are currently live in your head, with names attached, with details you cannot discuss with anybody?

Four is not unusual for somebody in your position and neither is seven.

There is no arrangement in the world where a single person holds seven of those and is fine, and the fact that you appear fine is not evidence against that sentence. It is evidence that you are extremely good at this.

You are not built to hold this many, and nobody ever was. That is not a soft word offered to a competent woman with a plate in front of her. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been reading yours through all four of them this week, and He is not impressed by the appearing fine, He is simply aware of the number.

The sentence a leader said out loud

There is a moment in Numbers that ought to be read out in every church that has a person like you in it.

Moses had exactly your job. He had an enormous number of people bringing him everything, and he had been doing it a long time, and he was doing it well.

I am not able to bear all this people alone, because it is too heavy for me.Numbers 11:14

He said that out loud. To God. In those words.

And what is remarkable is what happens next, because God does not rebuke him and does not tell him to draw on deeper reserves. He arranges for seventy others to carry it with him, and the text says He took of the spirit that was upon Moses and put it upon them.

That is the divine response to a leader saying he cannot do it alone: not a stronger leader, but more shoulders, and the same Spirit distributed across them.

You are not disqualified by admitting the number, and the admitting is what the whole passage turns on. I am not saying it to give you an excuse: it is the sentence Moses actually said and what God actually did next (Numbers 11:14), and it is His Spirit, not this page, who makes it something you can say out loud in a hall on a Sunday.

And a fast held for a church is not a load bearing wall

Here is a thing that has to be said plainly, because of where that suggestion landed.

Going without food is not a covering over a congregation and it is not a wall around anybody's marriage, and if it were, then it would have to be maintained, and the maintaining would land on you, because everything else does.

You are not the structure holding that building up, and you were never appointed to be. Scripture says upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it (Matthew 16:18), and it is His Spirit who makes that a fact about who is doing the building rather than a line for a sermon, and the sentence has one builder in it.

Now the rule this site says everywhere. Some people must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing away from you. Diabetes, pregnancy, medication, any hard relationship with eating, being underweight, unwell, elderly or simply unsure: speak to your doctor and let their answer be the answer. And a woman holding four other people's crises needs feeding, not one more thing taken off her. You are not one step further from God because of what your body needs. Scripture says the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), and the Holy Spirit has never once come in a smaller measure to anybody on account of a body.

And if this week has more in it than a page can carry, if you are frightened for yourself, put this down and ring somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight. That is not a road around God. That is help He put in the world on purpose.