Nobody Is Assigned To You

The list is laminated. That is the detail that undid him.

It is a good system and he built it. Every person in the church who is going through something is on it, and beside each name is another name, the person who is checking on them, and there is a date, and there is a little box that gets a tick. Two hundred and forty names. It took him a year to get it right and it works, and people who used to fall through are not falling through anymore, and he is genuinely proud of it.

He was in the car park on a Tuesday night in October with the laminated copy on the passenger seat, and he had been going down it after the meeting the way he does, and somewhere around the second column he stopped.

He looked for his own name.

It is not on there. Of course it is not on there. His name is in the other column forty one times.

He sat in the car for a while. Then he did a thing he is not proud of and would not tell his wife about, which is that he went through the whole list a second time, slowly, both columns, checking.

Forty one times as the carer. Zero times as the person being carried.

He is fifty two. He has been in ministry twenty six years. He knows every verse anybody would quote at him about this and he has preached most of them, and the knowing has not made the slightest difference, because the problem is not that he does not know.

It is that there is nobody whose job it is to notice.

Moses did not hold his own arms up

There is a battle in Exodus where Israel wins as long as Moses holds his hands up, and Moses, being a human being with shoulders, cannot.

What happens next is one of the most practical sentences in the Old Testament.

But Moses' hands were heavy; and they took a stone, and put it under him, and he sat thereon; and Aaron and Hur stayed up his hands, the one on the one side, and the other on the other side.Exodus 17:12

Take that in the dark car park. You are allowed a stone under you. The word says they took a stone, and put it under him, and he sat thereon, and it is the Holy Spirit who put two named men under the arms of the man everybody leaned on.

Read it slowly. They took a stone and put it under him. Somebody made the leader sit down. And then two named men, one under each arm, held up the arms of the man everybody else was depending on.

Nobody in that account suggests Moses should have managed. Nobody frames it as a failure of stamina or of faith. The text simply states that his hands were heavy, which is what hands do, and describes two men doing the obvious thing.

So take this in your car, and know it is not my comfort, it is what is written: you are inside that arrangement right now, as you read this, and it is not a lower tier of ministry. His word says Aaron and Hur held up his hands, and it is the Holy Spirit who put that verse in Scripture so that no man at the front ever concludes he is the exception to it.

Twenty six years you have been Aaron for other people. There is no verse anywhere that says the person at the front does not get a stone put under him.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who had a night in a small meeting where his heart was strangely warmed, and who then built a movement, and the load bearing beam of it was not his preaching, though he preached for fifty years in fields and mine yards and prisons.

It was six or seven people in a room, once a week. A class meeting.

Nobody taught in it. There was no platform, no expert, no curriculum. A handful of people sat down and were asked, out loud, how it truly stood with them, and they said, and the others heard it, and then they prayed and went home.

And here is the thing that ought to go straight into your laminated list: the leaders were in those rooms as members. He was asked the question like everybody else. He built a structure in which the man at the front was somebody's assignment.

The nickname was invented to mock how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was accurate.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the hinge was a small room where the preacher was also a person.